Her fury brought her further than the hiking guide had predicted. Bess, with her left hand propping the book on her knee and her right gripping the still cold water bottle, swished her mouth and teeth before swallowing. She let a trickle slip between her lips and, using her flannel-shirted shoulder, wiped her face. The breeze evaporated the moisture and, in spite of her pique, she felt cooled.

    Her side ached with the remnants of her stitch, born during the thirty-two percent grade of the last stretch. She strove to moderate the huffing and puffing while deciding that the nasty little quarter mile was aptly named Heart Attack Hill. She was in good shape, dammit, but anger made a bad partner for a strenuous trek through the mountainous trails of the Adeline Ridge State Park.

    It could have been fun, she thought, wincing at the tree lash on her shin. She tipped a splash of water on it, wiped the reddened strip with an antiseptic baby wipe, and vowed to be more careful. Bess dug a spray bottle of Nu-skin from her pocket and squirted the scrape. The sealant dried to a protective shield and she blew on the spot, enjoying the sensation on her exercise warm skin.

    She wished they made a product that worked that well on scraped hearts.

    The wilderness that seemed to fill the horizon stretched the periphery of her soul and painted her an image that would flicker on her imagination like the retinal burn from a particularly bright blaze of lightening. She'd been away too long. Though she loved the urban life and married a city-boy, merely sitting against a boulder and being surrounded by trees calmed the inner hurricane of hustle and deadlines and muted the shrill mind-numbing bleating of too many people, too many cars, and too many demands.

    Bess had longed for the solitude though, until immersed in it, hadn't realized how much she'd needed it.

    Cal had promised that this time they would go. Twice before they'd made the plan and something had come up both times. "No excuses," he'd said. Yeah... No excuses but no call and no show as well. After an hour and a half of waiting at the trailhead, cell phone useless in the deep valley, Bess's temper had overcome her good sense and she had repacked the backpacks and left his in her trunk. If he showed up then he could catch up. Otherwise she would hike out alone until dusk, spend the night, and hike back along the lower trail on the next day.

    Alone, and furious about being alone, Bess stood and gave the vista a last scan. She wondered if the scenery had changed much from the first time a person had looked out across the landscape. The trees, their leaves an endless variety of greens, yellow-greens and green-blues, appeared as a solid canopy as far as she could see. The boughs dipped and tossed. The leaves fluttered, flashing paler undersides. The low swish of the wind whispering, whistling, and whining through the branches could be restful and soothing but, today, only reminded her that she was alone.

    Further up. Further in. The words from C.S. Lewis's 'The Last Battle' echoed like a marching cadence as she stormed along. Her trail joined a larger one for a mile, which ended in a clearing with a fire tower in the middle. At the moment, there were no rangers on duty and there wouldn't be until the hot dry weather started, bringing summer heat lightening and brush fires into the undergrowth. A comfort station, a glorified privy, was nestled under the steel legs of the 315-foot structure and, being the last one on her route, Bess took advantage of civilized necessity.

    A shed, no more. One end a his. The other a hers. No electric, but semi-transparent Plexiglas domes allowed a thin illumination within. Every cloud dimmed the interior and, she thought, by August the sun would bake this place of a thousand desperate hikers, day-walkers and no windows into a smelly hell.

    The facilities came as no surprise; she'd expected drop toilets and a hand pump. The bright spot of blood staining her underwear was, however, and an unwelcome one. They'd timed this hike to avoid the possibility. She sighed. The best laid plans, indeed. Using Braille, she found a tampon in the front pouch of her pack. She remembered putting it there during their last trip - the one to Cancun.

    That had been a perfect vacation. Basking in the sun all morning and watching the European women stroll around topless. Cal had dared her, encouraged her, and egged her on until, on the last morning, she'd shed her bra, too. He'd been very careful in applying the sunscreen to those particular pieces of flesh. She laughed at him, saying she wouldn't need the lotion if his tent got any bigger.

    The late afternoons were spent lolling in the immense bed with the fluffy bolsters and faux mosquito netting. She had never felt as beautiful as she had in those luxuriant hours.

    In the evenings, they'd usually go clubbing awhile, but ended up strolling on the beach or along the palm lined pebble paths. They took long barefoot rambles, shoes dangling from their fingers, occasionally chatting, sometimes quiet, and always holding hands or touching. No hurry. No scurry. No timetable. Which was what this trip was supposed to be about, too, but somehow had gotten messed up.

    Bess bundled the non-biodegradable pieces and discarded them in the bin. She manhandled the pump into motion. It squealed like a dying creature until the rust loosened and lubrication from the internal mechanisms oiled the piston-like parts. The water was frigid but gritty. She filled one of her empties with the tan liquid, thinking she'd use it for washing.

    The bureaucratic process, for a change, hadn't overcome some sensible social designer's plan, so she fed coins into the feminine hygiene supply machine until she ran out. Eight. Bess did a little easy math. Eight, plus the two she always kept in her first-aid kit would see her through her journey. It wasn't like she was going to the ends of the earth and back. She tucked the slender tubes into her pack, heaved it to her shoulders and returned to the sunlight of the clearing. According to her guide, her trail would leave the circle at the southern end.

    A smudge of shadow revealed the opening in the ring of trees. Her way forward into the untouched wilderness, or as close as she was ever going to get. After the glare of the full sun, the woods were dark. Her eyes adjusted but not before missing the cutoff just inside the forest's sway. Her afternoon passed slowly, as did her unhappiness in a cacophony of memories, mostly bitter. She scripted an argument with Cal, sparring with him in her imagination until she won the concession of his guilt.

    It wasn't until the evening shadows had stretched too far that she discovered her mistake and made several more in her confusion while trying to make her map fit the wrong path. Of course, by then, she knew that being lost wasn't her biggest problem. Her bleeding was. Not just a period. One more sanitary change and her trove would be exhausted.

    Bess opened her hikers' guide and, ignoring the twin discomforts of cramps and worry, tried to retrace her journey and pinpoint where the whole thing, like her marriage, had gone so wrong as to leave her sitting alone in the wild.

    At some point, mistakes gain momentum and, like the gnats that whined around her as she studied her map, become too many to bother counting and squashing one does no good at all.

    When lost, she knew, it was better to stay put and let the rescuers find her but - a big whopping 'but' - had she been reported missing? She unsnapped the pouch on her strap and slid the cell phone out. She waited for the little musically-accompanied logo to fade and pushed the button. ' NO SERVICE ' flashed. Bess thought of the fire tower so many miles and wrong turns behind with regret.

    Weary and bone tired, she arranged her supplies into some sort of camp, striving for normality. Open fires weren't encouraged but the possibility of someone sighting the flame and reporting it also brought the possibility that the rangers might investigate.

    Twice while lifting heavier dead wood gray spots appeared in her eyes and she'd dropped both branches before passing out. The second time, warmth blossomed between her legs and she nearly vomited when she saw what had been purged. She hadn't known and wondered if it would have been a boy or a girl. Not certain whether to grieve or celebrate, Bess hoped that finishing a miscarriage also meant her bleeding would stop.

    She settled into her sleeping bag, not noticing the lumps and bumps. She'd changed her clothes and used the flannel shirt, folded like a diaper, as sanitary insurance. She fell asleep and dreamed about Cal and the baby that wasn't. They were searching the apartment with flashlights, looking for where she'd lost it. Finally, they sat under a tree in the living room and he held her while she cried and apologized.

    He whispered a comforting thought just before she fell out of dreaming and into exhausted slumber. "I'll always be with you. If I'm not here beside you," he touched his chest, "I'm here inside you," and moved his hand to cover her heart.

    She awoke before sunrise in the miserly gray light of pre-dawn, thirsty and sticky and very aware that her bleeding hadn't stopped. The flannel shirt was soaked as was the lining of her sleeping bag. Her body resisted her efforts to sit up but she struggled out of the zippered side. Pieces of herself ran down her legs as she stood, dropping to the forest floor with a raw squishy sound. Tottering, she grabbed for her knees and waited for the dizziness to subside. It took too long and gave her ample opportunity to admire fate's nasty artwork spattering the ground between her feet.

    Bess wiped her thighs with yesterday's tee shirt and used her dirty socks to blot her sleeping bag. She dragged the bedding closer to the coals and lay back down. She sipped water and waited for sunrise and tried to make a plan. Only the sipping water part was easy and she remembered her dream. A tree in the living room made her smile. Cal's words made her cry.

    She startled out of a nap she hadn't meant to take. The sun had risen but a glance at her watch said that she hadn't slept very long and wondered what had awakened her. There. A sound. A not-forest noise. A low-pitched rumble followed by a mournful hoooooo. A train. She knew where she was.

    She didn't make it to her feet before reaching her backpack. Still on her knees, she fumbled the hikers' guide from the mesh pocket where she'd stuffed it the night before. She flipped through the pages looking for the right one. Only one of the trails ran adjacent to the G.N.&P Railway's right-of-way. Once she fixed a position, it was easy to backtrack on the map to the rangers' fire tower. Dammit , hadn't she gone off-track?

    Too far astray to retrace her steps. She figured that she had about a day's hike in her at half the pace of yesterday and that only if her water held out and she abandoned everything else. Bess plopped to her rump and hugged her legs. She pressed her eyes to knobby kneecaps and tried to think around the obstacle of her growing frantic fears, fighting the ferocious feeling of defeat. She giggled, thinking, 'frantic furry ferocious fears felt fuzzy for female forest folk.' Say that three times fast. "That, that, that."

    The last note of the train whistle shook her out of her flight of fantasy. 'Feverish forest female flees free fantasy.' She giggled again but, as the whooo-hooo died, a rational notion occurred to her. Who said that going back was the only way out? The train tracks were much closer and, mostly, downhill.

    Bess regained her feet, wondering how she'd ever thought that standing up was simple. A fresh gushing sensation rewarded the effort. She'd be damned if she was going to leave a trail of her blood and lumps of failed conception dribbling through the forest. The ants and bugs would have to skip that particular treat. Uncomfortably, mountain lions and coyotes entered her mind. The media loved to air that stuff. 'Mauled by a Grizzly, Man Survives Losing One Arm and Both Legs. Details at 11.'

    "Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!" she whispered, her eyes darting, considering and rejecting moss, compost, and tree bark as temporary solutions. Cave women probably knew what natural substances would work but she wasn't a cave woman and couldn't picture lining her panties with any of those things - besides, at this rate, she would deforest the whole hillside.

    The sleeping bag. Waterproof outside. Soft flannel lining. Yeah.

    She wondered if the guys who assembled her Swiss Army Knife could have imagined the myriad uses of the tool. She vowed to write a letter of thanks if... She vowed to write a letter WHEN she got out and thank the manufacturer.

    When she got out. When she got out. Chugga-chugga choo-choo.

    She hitched the makeshift pad a little higher and checked the elastic strap, once the closure for the rolled bag but refashioned to hold everything in place. It was tight, like a tourniquet. Maybe it would keep some blood pressured up into her head. Good thing it wasn't her head that was bleeding. 'She was fine until he put the tourniquet around her neck.' Laughing, very aware in another part of her brain that none of it was funny, Bess lifted her pack.

    Swinging it to her back almost knocked her down, but she stumbled and half-stepped until her feet and sense of balance were in accord. Water, hard candy, and a shredded wad of strips formerly known as sleeping bag were all it held and almost more than she could bear. As thirsty as she was the water, even the stuff from the rusty pump, would be gone soon and she would discard the strips of fabric as they became sodden.

    The hikers' guide went in her pocket along with her knife. She didn't want to dig through the backpack every time she checked her progress. On impulse she picked up her cell phone. She could toss it away later, if necessary, but maybe there'd be a signal when she got down to the rails. "Put up or shut up," she said aloud. "Live and learn." She took a few steps down the hill and away from the path before taking one last glance back. The campsite looked as if a voodoo sacrifice had taken place with bloody clothing strewn and piles of left-behind gear.

    She took a deep breath, ignored the wooziness, and discarded the worry that this would be her last mistake. "Do or die." Oh God, she hoped for the first options of each choice.

    The problem was, she decided, she had no trust in her decisions, though she would storm full speed ahead after making one. She didn't trust her ability to choose wisely. Is that why she didn't trust Cal? Because she'd chosen him and, considering her poor choices in the past, she always feared making another bad one?

    He'd never given her a reason to distrust him and hadn't understood her anger when, because of circumstance beyond his control, their plans had to be modified or shelved. He never questioned the necessity of changing his mind, never considered it a failure. A flat was a flat, not a judgment on his driving ability. A scorched meal was an opportunity for him to try that new little Greek take-out deli on the next block and not a calamity, as it would be for her.

    The miscarriage, to her, signified two failures. The first was in her choice of contraception method. Cal would have shrugged and bought a crib. She spent a few moments decorating a nursery before analyzing her other failure. She couldn't even successfully accomplish what billions of other women had... An accidental pregnancy.

    Indigent crack-heads managed to procreate. Teenage girls who couldn't balance a checkbook, pass ninth grade History, or speak a grammatically correct sentence could pop 'em out like rabbits. But not her. Not her.

    Bess, though anxiety pressed her, eased down the slope using trees as anchors and carefully plotting her next section of descent. From time to time, she changed pads and left the used scraps as Stephen King-esque trail markers. If they came looking for her, only a bloodhound with a serious sinus infection could miss her scent.

    Maybe, she thought, navigating a stretch of loose gravel, it wasn't that Cal was the wrong choice. Maybe he was the right man, but she didn't know how to be right? Her heel hit a bigger rock, starting a slide and she had time to think, 'Whoa, Bessie girl,' before the skree beneath her joined the cascade toward the bottom of the ravine. "Shit," she yelled, missing grabbing a tree trunk by a fingertip. And she fell.

    The sun dappled her face through the leaves. It was probably a good thing her head was lower than her feet or she might not have woken up, Bess thought. Upside down the world looked remarkably serene and still. She must have lain there quite a while for the dust to clear and the new stones of the recent slide to settle into temporary equilibrium with the older ones. How easy it would be to stay and hope for another slide to bury her.

    Bess crab walked until her legs pointed down and then scooted on her butt to the edge of the slide zone. Using a large boulder for support, she clambered upright a bit at a time and almost lost her balance when her cell phone chirped. Frantically, Bess groped for the familiar shape and thanked the angel of communication, Gabriel maybe, for its survival.

    "Hello! Hello!" she panted. So hard to inhale? Wind knocked out by the tumble - or not enough blood to supply her needs? She tried to hold her breath, listening.

    A burst of almost language static filled her ear. "I can't hear you. If you can hear me, listen!" Talk fast. "I'm heading for the G.N.&P tracks. I'm hurt. Hurry!"

    She repeated the same words, interrupted by periodic static and ominous silences. Finally, she said, "If this is you Cal... I love you. I'm sorry." Whatever shift in the atmosphere that had permitted the moment of signal ended and the phone beeped off.

    Even the hope kindled by that lucky contact ebbed as the afternoon wore on. The bright red blood of the evening before had paled. She figured that as a symptom of not having anything left to lose. "I gave in the forest," she whispered and snickered. She took the last swig of tan water, considered saving the bottle in case she stumbled on to a stream. "In to, more like," she joked, picturing herself sitting a cool mountain brook. It would be nice to be clean. She dropped the plastic container and trudged on until she fell over a root.

    It was close but Bess argued with her feet and legs until they cooperated. She rejected lifting the backpack, though. She stuffed the few sleeping bag scraps through her belt loops. The sack laid deflated, an empty husk of its former robust self. She knew how it felt.

    She resolved not to fall again. There was no 'getting up' left.

    Left. Right. Left. Right. Chugga-chugga, choo-choo. The mantra moved her feet but she didn't know if they knew where to go. She sure didn't and she hadn't heard another train.

    Foot. Foot. One more. The ground seemed closer and it hurt when she hit it. Could she? Would she? Rise again? I do not like falling, Sam I Am. Where were her feet, anyway? Not available for comment. Her chin would listen, though and Bess turned her face to see what lay ahead.

    A barren desert of black rock stretched forever, broken by a few diseased-looking greener patches. In the distance a cliff loomed. Boy-oh-boy that last wrong turn was a doozy.

    Ah, man. Life's a bitch and then we die . Bess's mind descended to where her pain had no significance and her fear held no control.

    Bess woke up, not knowing how. She was somewhere else. A cool hand gripped hers and Cal's voice said, "I'm here, Bess. Hang on." So she tried.

    They never told her how close she'd been and Bess didn't ask. The answer showed in Cal's tear-reddened eyes and the nurses' quiet voices. She didn't ask much of anything and was content to be clean and safe.

    "Why didn't you come?" she asked him in the dark, needing to know more important things but it was too soon to ask.

    "Fender bender. I tried to call."

    "I'm sorry." She told him about the baby and how they'd looked for it in her dream. She told him what he'd said to her at the end of the dream. She told him about falling off the mountain and the cell phone call. Is that how they'd found her?

    "No. I never got through." Railroad workers had found her and she wondered aloud why they were in the black desert. She told him about all her wrong turns and poor choices, except for him. Except for him.

    He cried. She cried. Together. Hell, who needed answers to questions that didn't mean anything, anyway?

    The trees blazed in fall's festive foliage. Forest female fears fancy foliage . Bess looked away from the glorious display, trying to banish the alliterative phrase that kept repeating in her brain. Panic, a persistent companion since her misadventure, shimmied from her guts to her chest, dancing faster as Cal drove deeper into the forest.

    "Why do we have to do this?" she asked. He shook his head, and concentrated on the rutted logging road.

    He made good choices. She'd go with it, trusting him more than herself.

    He parked the car in a pull-off, slung a pair of water camels on his shoulders and motioned for her to follow. Fear, unreasonable but indisputable, gripped her throat and kept her breathless up the trail and along a short ravine. A mile or two. No more.

    The path ended at the railroad tracks. The mountains loomed menacingly, hedging the narrow valley with their backs of splintered gray stone and mantle of fiery-leafed trees. Cal pulled a piece of paper from his jeans pocket and looked back and forth along the roadway.

    "This way," he said, claiming her hand, and they walked another hundred yards, side by side. "Here."

    "What?" Bess asked. "Here what?"

    He gestured to the tar-covered birm and said, "This is where the maintenance crew stumbled over you."

    She started to object but stopped when he stepped off the right-of-way and lay down in the grass. He smiled and patted the spot next to him. Shrugging, Bess joined him.

    Bess wriggled until her head was on the railbed and craned her neck. Her black desert, the tar-covered gravel. The diseased green patches, tenacious grass poking through. The cliff, the nearer rail.

    "When you needed to make good choices, you did," Cal said. "You found the way back to me."

    And found the way back to herself, too.

    Maybe the difference between wrong turns and opportunity was in her point of view. Maybe the difference between failure and success hinged on changing how she looked at it. Maybe, changing her life was as simple as raising her head.

    And, maybe, happiness was a matter of perspective.