Holston smiled to himself as he listened to the morning forecast in anticipation of the hike up Black Mountain to the place he called the Gateway, a cleft in the huge sandstone boulders through which you could squeeze and find yourself in a cathedral of boulders as big as houses and which hardly anyone knew about. He wanted to be alone, to think about his decision to leave his wife. It wasn’t an affair with another woman, it was an affair with himself, with this same desire he was feeling just now to get away, to be on his own, to live the remainder of his life on his own terms.

Who in the world gives up a long and apparently successful marriage to be alone? It didn’t make any sense and still he felt elated, like he had climbed a mountain to a resolution but that he didn’t yet fully know the emotional terrain. He wanted the solitude of the Gateway in which to celebrate his decision to go it alone, his assault on this final emotional summit, and so here he was, stuffing a bottle of water and an energy bar into his day pack and setting off. The drive was only an hour before he was stepping out into a cold wind. Clouds had covered the sky, and he briefly wondered what had happened to the forecast for partly cloudy with rain not developing until late in the day.

He zipped his down vest all the way up to his neck and started on the trail that was paved before giving way to a dirt track climbing through second-growth oak and hickory forest. After about a mile mist began to cover the woods dampening his face. The wind rattled the dry oak leaves clinging tenaciously to their branches. He forged ahead, in hopes he would find shelter once through the Gateway. In another mile a sign read “Overlook” and pointed toward a side trail leading to a rock outcropping.

Holston turned onto this trail and climbed out onto a huge precipice of sandstone that looked eastward over the valley, but a thick mist obscured the view so he turned back to the main trail. In another half-mile he began his descent through the crevice. A thin sheet of frost covered the rock steps and he slipped and fell once. After that he used the rock walls to steady himself until he was on firm ground. The huge boulders all around hemmed him in, and instead of feeling elated, he felt a kind of loneliness that he’d never experienced before. The dappled sunshine and warm autumn breeze he had hoped for were missing. Only the cold wind blowing mists up from the valley sounded through the trees like something spiritual questioning his decisions and undermining his determination to see the journey all the way through.

Holston descended through switchbacks until he came to a side trail with a sign pointing to Windless Cave. The cave floor was sodden, so he spread his ground cloth on a flat rock just outside and sat to eat his bar. He listened to the wind’s lonesome sound in the high bare branches of the trees and wondered how it would it be to live alone with no one to depend on and no one to depend on him. He reached for the water bottle but it wasn’t where he’d put it. He searched all the pockets in the pack but it was gone. He suddenly felt none of the certainty he’d felt this morning. There was only himself and this cold wind and these lonely sounds.

As snow began to fall, he told himself this change in the weather was only temporary. After all, he knew these parts like the back of his hand. He leaned back and closed his eyes, recounting to himself the steps he’d taken in coming to his decision, remembering the elation but not feeling it anymore.

When he opened his eyes, the snow was coming down hard in great wet gobs that clung to everything, covering the rocks. He stuffed the paper wrapper from his bar into a pocket, shouldered the pack, and began the climb up through the switchbacks to the crevice leading to the plateau above. The ground was even more slippery than before, and the climb took him twice as long. When he finally came out on top, thick snow had covered everything, and he thought how stupid it was for him to have come up here without telling anyone where he was going. Of course, nothing could happen to him. He was seasoned, knew what he was doing, but even so, when you are out in the wilderness, you are always on a knife’s edge between safety and disaster. “I’ll be okay,” he said out loud.

He slogged down the other side of the mountain to where his car was parked. The snow and mud stuck to his boots making his feet feel as heavy as sledgehammers. Suddenly he spotted his water bottle, its blue label barely visible beneath the snow. He put it in the mesh pocket of his pack and trudged on. His pants were soaked and he felt more miserable by the minute. This isn’t how it was supposed to be he thought. Only a mile to go, and then I can warm up in the car. I should have brought a heavier jacket. “The damn weather report was wrong,” he muttered to himself. He slogged onward, wetter, colder, more and more disconcerted at his loss of the joy of being alone, of having life on his own terms where and when and how he wanted it.

He pulled into the garage and pressed the remote button to close the door and tramped in through the mud room and slung the pack onto the washer. The water bottle fell and the cap popped off, mingling water with the mud he’d tracked in. He grabbed it and set it on the kitchen counter next to the two coffee cups with the cold dregs of this morning’s coffee.

He heard the garage door opening again and, in a moment, his wife exclaiming at the mud and water on the floor. “I could have broken my neck,” she said as she looked at the floor and the bottle on the counter.

“I went hiking,” Holston said.

“In this weather?”

“It wasn’t this weather this morning. I got caught in it and lost my water.”

“You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”

“No, I had to come back.”