The Trailblazer Series

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONEThis climb is for you, Neil.

The summit of Mount Chocorua is an odd place. With a tree line lower than most peaks in New Hampshire's White Mountains, the rocky top makes it seem as though the mountain is taller than it is (just under three thousand five hundred feet). Its neighbors are taller—some significantly—and they qualify for the four-thousand-foot club, a glory that hikers can claim if they’ve made virtual notches on their hiking boots after climbing all the mountains in the Whites that have an elevation of four thousand feet or more. Chocorua doesn't qualify. Even so, it looks impressive. It's sometimes called "Little Matterhorn" because of its bald pate.

It's odd for another reason, too: the types of people who climb it. For example, as I sit here on the open rock face, looking south and westward toward where the September sun is beginning to descend, about twenty feet to my left is a guy with a golf club, driving balls into the forest below. This ought to be illegal, and probably it is; I mean, if you're going to die on this mountain, you should do it like I nearly did, not by getting beamed with a golf ball.

From where I stand, near the official summit marker on the jumble of boulders and crags, I can see the tops of trees below. Some wear the brilliant colors of autumn, while some—the mountain pines—are a green so dark they appear almost black against the oranges and golds. All looks peaceful, all looks like it is as it should be. And yet my head feels as jumbled as the rocks on the mountaintop—part vindication, part contrition, and maybe just a small bit of pride. When I’d been to Mount Chocorua the first time, last March, my first hike ever, I hadn’t made it to the summit. And maybe, in part, that was because I made that climb for all the wrong reasons.

This time I’m here because I felt the need to dedicate my climb up Chocorua to my brother. Neil had put many virtual notches on his hiking boots, representing the many summits he’d achieved. But although he had asked me more than once, I’d never hiked anywhere with him.

This mountain had nearly killed me last March. A few months later, a different one killed my brother.

So often I’ve heard about someone dying, and people say, "He died doing what he loved." Like that makes it okay. Well, Neil died on a hiking trip. He loved hiking. He lived for it. But I’ll bet he didn’t like the way he died.

Sorry. Can’t dwell on that right now. It was only a couple of months ago.

I nearly died because I fell for a guy I had no hope of winning, and then I took an active interest—feigned or otherwise—in whatever interested him. One of those things was mountain climbing. Much as I adored my brother, we went different ways in the outdoors. Even skiing; he did downhill and wasn’t interested in Nordic, which was the only kind of skiing I did.

But I didn't lust after my brother. I lusted after Daniel Cooke. So when he said Come hiking with me, that’s what I did. Together, we hiked Mt. Chocorua.

Daniel wasn't gay. Not exactly. He knew I was—or, I told him eventually. And he said that didn’t matter. At first I think he hung around with me after he met my sister Nina. Maybe he thought hanging out with me would give him an advantage with her. But after a while, I realized that wasn’t it. He just liked me. The sad part was I didn’t just like him. I wanted him.

For her part, Nina wasn't especially interested in Daniel, but he was attractive and convenient, which is probably why she didn’t outright reject him—at least, not at first. She kept him in her shadow for a while, and that kept him in my life.

How attractive was he? Let's see… dark brown hair with a nice wave to it, a little long on his neck and forehead; smooth skin the most beautiful bronze color (he was part Cherokee); a long, slender nose that didn't hook but that came to a refined end above sweetly-shaped lips the color of dark cherries; deep brown eyes; a body muscled in a way that wasn't bulky but that showed sleek definition whenever he needed to lift or pull something.

Oh, and there was something about him that I found compelling, as though he knew all kinds of secrets he'd be happy to tell you if you would but ask the right questions. I couldn’t understand why Nina didn't fall head-over-heels for him. God knows I did.

For this climb, today, my second up this mountain, I did not follow the Piper Trail, the one Daniel and I had followed. That climb had nearly ended my hiking career the same day it had begun. Instead I hiked Neil’s favorite trail up this picturesque mountain, the Champney Falls Trail. But I will visit the Jim Liberty Cabin, which sits just below the summit on the Liberty Trail. That cabin had been Daniel’s intended destination, the place he’d planned for us to spend the night on that hike that was my first, that hike that he suggested, that hike where I lost my hiking virginity.

The Piper Trail is the easiest on Chocorua, in terms of steepness of grade, but it’s not the shortest. Daniel chose it because despite his own expert standing as a hiker and ice climber, I was a novice. Oh, yeah, and it was March. In New Hampshire. Cold. Snow. Ice. Blizzards.

I met Daniel in the very beginning of my freshman year at college. Despite the fact that Neil had graduated from UNH—the University of New Hampshire in Durham—the previous year, and even though Nina was starting her second year there, I was anxious about my first year.

I'd been assigned a roommate over the summer, and he'd been the first to reach out. He'd sent me an actual letter, hand-written and everything, in a blue envelope that had arrived one rainy day in early August. The return address, from Lewiston, Maine, was from a person who identified himself as "L. Speed."

Nina thought this was a riot. "El Speed! Is he Latino? El Speedo… maybe he looks good in swim trunks!"

It turned out the L stood for Lawrence, or Larry, as he was usually called.

On that swelteringly hot day when Gram drove me and my few boxes of possessions and clothes down to Durham from our house in Concord in her old, green Honda, I was a mess. I'd packed and re-packed my clothes maybe three times in the previous few days. Before leaving that morning, I'd sat in my desk chair biting my lower lip for maybe fifteen minutes, rocking back and forth the whole time. I'd nearly thrown up my breakfast as we were loading the car.

Everything I was going to have to do in the next couple of days piled up in a mental heap in my brain, each new task coming to the fore in turns. I was going to meet El Speed. I'd need to get along with him, to agree on who got what side of the room we'd share. I'd have to figure out where my classes would be, meet all kinds of people I didn't yet know, navigate the dining hall without looking like the loner I felt I must be, figure out the best place to sit in each class, try and suss out the instructors so I’d know how much I’d be able to get away with in terms of studying—basically figure out all kinds of stuff I'd never had to do. I’d lived in the same house since I was too young to know the difference, so this upheaval was of a major kind.

It helped only so much that I had some familiarity with the campus, having visited a couple of times while Neil had been there. I knew I could count on no help from Nina. She and I were never enemies, but for reasons I never understood, the bond between us was pretty thin.

These are all things that might plague your average incoming college freshman. I had an additional layer of concern, sort of a foundational anxiety on which all the others rested: Should I come out now?

So far only Neil knew. I’d been able to keep it hidden at high school, but I was going to live at college. For all aspects of life, I would be immersed in the campus environment. Could I live that life, too, as a lie, as I’d lived so far? Or should I believe what I kept hearing about one’s college years, which is that it’s a great place to reinvent oneself?

Of course, I wouldn’t be re-inventing anything. I’d been hiding, and now I had the option to stop.

What might the consequences be? I mean, it was 2015, which was a lot further down the road of acceptance than when I was born, but just how far down that road were we? Would my roommate request a transfer? Would other students around the dining room sneak glances at me and whisper? Would no one take the seat next to me in classes?

I’m pretty sure that the decision I’d made the week before the semester began was what was making me nauseous. I’d decided that I would be honest about who I was, that I’d reveal it when it was appropriate. And if anyone didn’t like that, then f**k ’em. And that would include Nina, though I didn’t expect our paths would cross much.

Neil had been at Hunter Hall for all four years of his UNH career, and now he was in his first year of graduate school in Colorado. I suspect I'd chosen Hunter for my dorm because it would be familiar, one less thing for me to have to figure out, but it’s also possible that I saw it as maintaining my relationship with my brother. You know, like having something in common with him, something that was with me now that he was so far away. He'd been like a father to me, after our parents died. I don't know of anyone who was like a father to him.

El Speed, very tall and very blond and very solidly built—that is, my exact opposite—turned out to be pretty laid back about life in general. He didn't seem at all embarrassed when I caught him sniffing his day-old underwear to see if another wearing was possible.

"Why not?" he shrugged. "Why waste the time and the water and the electricity to wash something that doesn't need it?"

I just shook my head and wondered if his girlfriend knew. He'd started talking about Ellie, who was at the University of Maine in Orono, right after we'd met, and he'd said he had his car here on campus and would be driving up to see her frequently. At first I thought he might have picked up that I was gay and wanted to set the ground rules immediately. There were a few minutes where I tortured myself trying to decide whether to say anything. I finally decided I might get into more trouble by trying to hide who I was from him.

"I don’t have anyone like that in my life. Not yet, anyway. But it wouldn’t be a girlfriend." I busied myself with something in my closet, afraid to see his reaction.

His response sounded like a gentle shrug. "I'm cool with that."

So I came out of the closet. "Great. And, uh, y’know, I’d kind of like to be the one who tells anyone else."

"Got it."

Definitely easy going. He even got a kick out of my calling him El Speed, both because it was so similar to his girlfriend’s name and because he thought it was a little ironic. Chuckling, he shook his head. "Not much about me that folks are likely to call speedy."

It was because of El Speed that I met Daniel. I'd been complaining, the first couple of weeks, about two things. One was my calculus professor, whose habit of scribbling equations and formulas on the board with his right hand while talking about them, and erasing them with his left hand as he went, was not helping my comprehension. The other was not having enough spending money.

El Speed had no solution for the professor. But as to the money: "So why don't you get a job?"

"Here?" Now that I was here, even though I’d surmounted some of the obstacles that had made starting my freshman year seem so daunting, the idea of asking for, applying for a job intimidated me. At home I’d worked summers and many school-year weekends, often using my need to make money as an excuse for why I wasn’t asking girls out. But all those jobs had come to me by way of Gram’s connections. She’d lived in Concord all her life, and she was seen as a wonderful person, having raised her late daughter’s three children alone. So competing with other people who might want the job I was applying for, trying to impress a potential boss enough to make them choose me, maybe being rejected—it seemed like a lot.

Not to El Speed, evidently. "Sure. Like, maybe at the dining hall. You know that digital scrolling bulletin board they have there? It said they need people."

So I girded my proverbial loins, marched myself into the dining hall office, and applied. As I filled out the form, one of the options was whether I preferred to work on the serving line or in the dishroom. There was no option for the kitchen; maybe they didn’t let students cook the food they served. Too dangerous, for everyone. I was about to check "Serving Line" when I realized I really didn’t want to stand behind the steaming food cases and have someone ask me what I was serving, to which I’d have to reply, "Salmon loaf," at which point they would say, "What?" to which I’d have to reply, louder this time, "Salmon loaf." Nope; that wasn’t for me. I checked "Dishroom," figuring if it turned out to be awful I could always quit.

I started my new job the very next week, my third week at school. Gram was nervous.

"Are you sure you aren’t taking on too much? You’re just getting started in your classes."

I pictured her sitting at the kitchen table: short and very slender, her fluffy hair now more silver than the nearly-black she’d been born with. We were on the phone, Gram and I, about every third or fourth day in the beginning, though of course it thinned out as the semester wore on.

Her anxiety had an odd effect on me; it took mine away. I told her, "But I’m taking mostly intro subjects right now. I’ll be fine. And if not, I’ll quit."

But once I’d started the job, I didn’t want to quit. I’d met Daniel.

The first person I met when I showed up for my lunchtime shift, though, was Eva, a tiny drill sergeant of a woman, probably in her late fifties. She was dressed all in white, her more-salt-than-pepper hair confined by a white net, and she ruled over the entire dining operation—serving line, dishroom, and kitchen.

"Nathan, this is Daniel Cooke. He's the dishroom foreman," she told me without a shred of irony. It occurred to me to ask why he wasn’t in the kitchen, preparing food, with a name like that. But he stood beside her, and when I looked into his eyes, I was speechless.

We shook hands. "Welcome, Nathan. Glad to have another pair of hands in here. Come on; I’ll show you the ropes."

I’d have followed him anywhere. It wasn’t that he was gorgeous, though he was certainly attractive. But there was something about his face, something in his eyes maybe, that affected me powerfully, something that pulled at me. At first it didn’t seem s****l. And, with most people in the world being straight, I didn’t immediately wonder if he was gay, though it didn’t take me long to begin hoping.

If it hadn’t been for Daniel, I’d have been tempted to quit after my first shift. The dining hall itself was air-conditioned, but there was no way the climate of that white-tiled cave of a dishroom would be anything but hot and steamy. And there was no way to avoid the odd mixture of smells: a little garbage almost hidden under a layer of chlorine.

The room was partially bisected on the diagonal by a stainless-steel sheathed, tunnel-shaped behemoth that said "Hobart" on the end I could see. It was positioned between a spot near the rear right corner of the room and a spot most of the way toward the front left. It hissed and steamed in a rather intimidating way, and without seeing inside it I could tell something was grinding its way through the tunnel. But Daniel led over to the rear left corner of the cave, ignoring the bluster of that steel monster. He stopped on the near side of a long, waist-high, steel, shelf-like thing that extended from the wall on the left about fifteen feet into the room. He pointed me toward a position to the right of a girl who looked like she was probably also a freshman.

Daniel had to raise his voice to be heard over the din. "I’m going to have you work next to Lori here. Lori? Nathan. Jeff?" He pointed to a guy to my right, who stood at the end of the long steel thingy, then over at two guys on the opposite side of the steel thingy. "Dave? Aaron? This is Nathan."

Each introduction brought a nod from each of the others; apparently no one dared stop what they were doing long enough to give anything more by way of acknowledgement; the march of the trays, coming along a conveyer belt that flowed into the room from an opening in the left wall, all with gloppy, sticky, gunky stuff on them that had to be dealt with, was relentless.

Daniel gave me a quick rundown of my mission, which was to stand near the right end of the metal shelf, or counter, or whatever, and grab anything that the others had missed. They had specific tasks: crockery, flatware and paper, glassware, and trays. I was to grab any renegade item they might miss and place it on a rolling cart that someone else would replace as it got loaded.

I donned the rubber gloves Daniel handed me and stepped closer to my work station. Immediately I nearly fell. The conveyer belt with the trays flowed from left to right, but there was a sluiceway between me and it, full of water that flowed from right to left. It was amazingly disorienting.

Daniel caught me from behind. "Yeah, you’ll get used to that." I don’t want to, I thought, but of course he wasn’t talking about our physical contact. "It makes some people dizzy, with the conveyer belt and the water going opposite directions."

Daniel draped his right hand on my left shoulder and leaned his face toward my ear so I could hear him better. With his other hand he pointed at the wall to the left.

"See over there? That opening? The trays come from the dining room from two directions and merge there onto the single conveyer belt in front of you."

I nodded, hoping he’d keep talking; I could feel his breath on my ear. He obliged me.

"And see the low, plastic pegs along the belt? Ideally they keep the trays separated from each other as they merge. But sometimes…." He gave my shoulder a light pat, chuckled, and stepped away. "You’ll see."

I wanted to watch him walk away, but I also wanted to impress him. I turned to my task. Immediately I saw that Lori and the guys on the other side of the belt had started to let a few things slide through their frantic efforts to clear everything off, so I had no choice but to get going.

It took me several minutes to get used to the contrast between the belt and the water, but finally my brain managed to stabilize. It was hot work, I had to move quickly, and the din of the room discouraged small talk. So I felt like some kind of automaton. But I didn’t let anything get by me, and I didn’t break anything.

At one point, there was just too much stuff on the belt, and Lori hit a button on the wall. The belt stopped, and everyone scrambled to deal with what was in front of them. I knew that the longer that belt stayed still, the worse the load would be when it started back up. And, indeed, as soon as Lori hit the button again, the belt carried in trays stacked on trays, and she had to turn it off once more. Finally the lunch crowd thinned out enough that there were empty slots on the belt between trays, and one of the guys across from me left to do something else.

And Daniel was back. "How’d it go, Nathan?"

The room was a little quieter now, and I could hear a roundness in his voice that was sultry and seductive, even though I couldn’t believe he was consciously going for that effect. When he wasn’t shouting, his voice was deep and resonant.

"Okay, I guess." I wasn’t thinking fast enough to make a more interesting reply; at that moment, my brain wasn’t doing anything other than taking him in. He wasn’t tall, I realized, maybe a couple of inches taller than me. About Neil’s height, actually. And under the white, work overalls I was sure his body was trim and finely tuned. Also like Neil.

His laugh was low and soft. "You didn’t break anything or send a fork into the disposal, did you?"

"Disposal?"

He pointed in the direction where the water was still flowing, toward the wall. "At that end, on each side of the belt, the water sinks into a garbage disposal. You didn’t hear it go on and off? Lori had control of the switch. By the way, for future reference, if you do drop a fork in there and you need to reach for it, make sure whoever’s closest to the switch knows what you’re doing. Don’t want to chop up any fingers."

The room had been so noisy that although I’d been vaguely aware of an occasional whining sound, I hadn’t given it any thought.

"I’m giving you a bit of a break today, Nathan. Starting tomorrow, I’ll have you help with the cleanup. For today, just stand someplace out of the way and watch what the others are doing. Tomorrow you and Jeff can work together, and after that you’ll have your own territory."

He smiled and started to walk away, but he stopped about five feet from me.

"Nathan? Glad to have you." This time I did watch as he walked away. And I really liked what I saw.

As I was about to leave the dining hall for the day, Eva approached me.

"I hope you had a good first day, Nathan."

"Yes, ma’am."

She smiled, and it seemed genuine and friendly. "We rely on Daniel quite a bit. He does a great job in there."

I saw an opening for learning a little more. "Is he a senior, or something?"

"Oh, Daniel isn’t a student. He’s taking a year off, actually. No, this is his job. He was at a school in New Jersey, I think, for two years, and he’s taking some time to decide whether to change majors."

"Oh. I—so, why here? What’s he doing in New Hampshire?"

She grinned and leaned a little toward me as though sharing a secret. "I think he likes the mountains."