I can't go hiking without thinking of Harbo. It's a strange thing because we hiked together maybe a few times over just those short years of high school. Nevertheless, my archetype of hiking was in part established by his passion for it, his discipline toward it, and now the the wilderness is a theater for my memories of him.

I miss him. After all these years, more than half my lifetime, I still miss him. Never again a friend so unerringly, unceasingly funny. And it seems, never again his friendship—he's alive, he just disinherited himself from us. That is why if two or all of the rest of us happen to find ourselves together, conversation will inevitably revert to old stories of the time when he was with us and we'll throw shapes in feeble attempt to mimic him. We fail for each other, but we know what we mean. All we need is the cue to play our own tapes of his performances.

I spent a lot of nights with him. When I think about it now, I don't know quite how it was that gma protested so little at the amount of time, the whole nights, I stayed at his house. Possibly I lied and said I was staying at Mary's or Erin's instead. But gma knew about the hikes, our solo adventures in the wilderness. At the age I am now, in this time, I can't imagine parents driving their adolescent children to a remote trailhead and turning them loose for four days at a stretch to wander without supervision in the forest, and then returning four days later with the trust that their children had made their way out. We all did that then, which was not that long ago. Perhaps where there are still pockets of rural living parents still entrust the country with their children.

Harbo and I were just friends and I told him everything. Late into the night, in his chocolate-chip tent or on his denuded waterbed, we'd share secrets. His lust for Erin and Paulina Porizkova ("humina humina"), his love for Tawnya, and my spinning mobile of Mike, Jason, and Lee. During the school year we met in his room "to study." His parents house was a suburban standard box with a tongue of stairs behind the front door that lapped us to the second floor where the bedrooms were, and there, Harbo's bedroom, crammed to the gills with the sheetless waterbed, his backpacking gear, an Apple II computer, and a bird named Lymie. We gabbed and horsed around and sometimes giggled along to the tape he used to play to teach the bird to speak. "Hello." … "Heelllooo." … "Hel-LOO." …

The summers we spent out on Hwy 3 in his camaro, that gray hulking thing, often with Erin riding shotgun. We passed warm summer afternoons at Twanoh State Park, Erin and I stretched out on towels in our bikinis. Many an evening afterward we'd take that shark of a car to the Rodeo Drive-In. I don't remember a thing we saw there.

Harbo always kept his backpack packed and his Rambo knife under the pillow on his waterbed. He could hike at a moment's notice.

I don't know why we thought it was a good idea to take Erin and her Finnish exchange student, Ari, on a four-day hike up the Duckabush, or why Erin agreed to it—her naivete of such activities surely fundamental to the whole thing getting off the ground. Harbo's parents dropped us off at the trailhead and as the dust of their departure settled we tightened the cinches on our packs. Harbo's all packed since the last trip; mine spare by the discipline imparted by hiking with Mike. But Erin and her pack (who knows where that came from!) was disorganized by an astonishing array of comforts, including a hardbound edition of War and Peace that she couldn't find a place for and which was eventually handed off to Ari, who, for his part, brought ample European cologne.

A little ways in on the Duckabush you encounter some kind of knob the guide books call "Big Hump" that only 50-something switchbacks will help you best, and which, after we did it that first time, forever became "the fucking hill." We camped the first night at 5-mile camp and built a fire by dousing white gas on wet wood. Later, from the relative isolation of our sleeping bags, we told coy and lascivious jokes, which were the harbinger of the now immortal proclamation from Ari: "I'm having hots!" The next day at 10-mile camp, I felt a dubious illness and we decided turned back early rather than risk a real illness more than a two-day's walk from the trailhead.We returned to 5-mile camp and cursed it back over the fucking hill and all the way to the trailhead, from which Harbo and I walked another three to four miles in search of a phone we could use to call his folks. We waited for hours for them to arrive. Erin read War and Peace the whole time.

That same summer, Harbo and I took off alone to find Sundown Lake. Easily accessible through the Wynoochee, for some reason we were obsessed with finding the lake via the unmaintained access from the Skokomish side. Maybe we wanted to be hard-core, or we wanted to differentiate ourselves in some crazy way you're always trying to do at that age. Not sure. I can't even remember how we got there, whether we could drive ourselves by that time or whether someone else drove us. But I remember that first camp in the low lush forest next to the Skoke. He opened his mess kit and a burst of spores coated us. He had never unpacked his pack from the last hike. I was like, "Gross" and he was like, "Nothing a little fire won't fix" as he plunged the thin tin into the flame and held it there until you could save a soldier with it. For my part, I had assuredlly packed a meal set comprised entirely of canned food and then neglected to bring a can opener. To eat I had to breach the metal with some improvised collection of weaponry and work to pry open the can just enough get the food out.

By the second night we'd lost the trail and were camped at the end of the last recognizable bit of trod earth we could find. We'd trailblazed the better part of the afternoon but had found nothing. Eventually we pitched the chocolate-chip tent. I went to work on a can and he started in with stories of gnomes and creatures that lived under the hills. "That little bump over there, he lives there. When we're asleep he'll punch out of it and hide again if we wake up." Like that. We hung our food from a limb and turned out the light, a candlelantern he swore by, and I was too scared to leave the tent to pee.

At dawn we woke to the clomp of heavy boots. Outside the tent, two men had lost their way, as we had, and they now stood at the end of the line, which was our tent. Behind them I saw our bag of food resting on the ground. The limb we'd made into our bear wire had bent from the weight in the night (those cans!). No evidence of gnomes. The men turned around for what they thought was the trail and we scrambled to dismantle camp to follow them. That's how we found the lake.

Sundown lake is a small, clear round of snowmelt surrounded on three sides by high peaks. Snow perseveres throughoutt the summer at the shaded end and tunnels form as the water asserts itself from underneath. We camped by the lake for a couple of days, subsisting on "pancake-um" for breakfast and otherwise ramen for Harbo and pried-from-the-can stew for me. He fished during the days and I watched him, having no interest in it. One of the days another couple appeared at the lake, from the Wynoochee side. They pitched their tent and came to our side of the lake to say hi. Then they disappeared inside and from our camp we watched the tent spasm and writhe to our giggling soundtrack.

Hiked this weekend up the Big Quilcene with Tom. The first trip together in too many years. He didn't remember that the last overnighter we took was the year he got his new tent. That was seven years ago.

The trail goes up and up without the respite of switchbacks. Cold, and getting colder. Even so, a lethargic bee found its way to some part of exposed flesh and dared to sting me. Hikers coming out warned us of snow, of blizzard conditions by one report. We found the snow well before Camp Mystery at 5400 feet. We pitched the tent and I dove in and stayed there till I could stop shivering. Then it was dusk and I was warmer than before, so we boiled the water and poured the water into the bags of dried food and dragged the rehydrating food into the tent where we ate it all. Then we retreated into the sleeping bags for warmth. We read and chatted, plotted a hike for next year, and, as they say, retired early. According to the book, Camp Mystery is a good spot for base camp because it is out of the wind, but we found that we were subject to heavy gusts that tested the tent from all directions. Lying there in the otherwise silent dark we could hear the gusts gather strength as they descended the forested slopes—a poltergeist. It began as a far-away rustle that swelled to a roar and that came upon us in a violent slap against the thin nylon and the spindly poles. I slept fitfully, waking from the din of a gust or when my hip bone ached too much. The whole night went like that, rolling over and going to sleep until one or the other woke me again and the whole cycle repeated. Then a mouse appeared in the tent and ran all around and over us, and that woke us too. We froze it in the beam of a headlamp. It was the cutest little mouse, plush gray and all round ears. Its eyes dark little bearings. Tom opened the door and scootched it out. I couldn't go back to sleep directly so I started talking about Harbo, who'd been on my mind off and on throughout the day.

Tom and I were friends before I became friends with Harbo; Tom and Harbo were friends before that. Strangely, I don't recall spending much time with them together. Maybe we were friends at different times? It's hard to tell now. I told Tom some of what I missed, some of those memories from hiking together. And Tom reminded me of things I knew but that weren't mine for the remembering. He recounted the summer that all of them, all of those guys, hiked the Dose-ee to the Enchanted Valley. About Garcia's cupboard of canned goods that his folks packed for him and that the group had to distribute among each other so that Garcia could bear the weight. He mentioned Copperthite and his duct-taped introversion. And of course, he talked about the Humdinger, the double-dong Harbo carved and subsequently used to torment the others. Everyone carved a dong of some kind, but only the Humdinger survives the telling, for its double-endedness and the fervor of its creator. The Humdinger made it home, but Harbo eventually hucked it into the woods behind his house to rid himself of it and the cursed attention it brought.