The Woman At The Trailhead Warned Me And The Car Park Camera Says She Was Not There

She was at the map board when I arrived: fifties, walking poles, sun hat, the whole uniform.

She said the creek crossing was "wrong today" and that I should take the high route.

I said thanks, and I did not take the high route, because I am an idiot with a schedule.

The creek was in flood. It did not look like it from the bank — that is the thing about that particular crossing, it lies to you. I went in, and I went down, and I lost a pole and most of my confidence, and I got out on the wrong side with a bleeding shin and about four hours of my life gone.

I came back to the car park at dusk, shaking, and told the man in the kiosk about the woman, because I wanted somebody to tell her she had been right.

He said, "What woman?"

The kiosk has a camera on the map board. Insurance thing. He showed me — because he was a decent man and because I was clearly not well — the footage from that morning.

There I am, arriving. There I am, standing at the map board. There I am, talking, for ninety seconds, with my head turned to my right and my hands doing the thing my hands do, nodding, laughing once.

At nobody.

There is nobody there. There is a map board and a bin and a gravel car park and a man in his thirties chatting away to the air like a lunatic.

He turned the screen off and did not make a joke, which I have always appreciated.

I have thought about the shape of my body in that footage. My head is turned to the right and slightly up. She was about my height. I was looking at where her face would be. My eyes were tracking something.

I keep coming back to the fact that she was RIGHT. Whatever she was, she looked at a man in a fleece with a stupid schedule and she tried to save him four hours and a stitch in his leg.

I did not listen, and I nearly drowned, and I have never gone back to that trail without saying, out loud, at the map board: "Which way today?"

She has never answered. I ask anyway.