He ate in a little restaurant off of the highway up near Tionesta. A small, homey shack on the far side of a parking lot. It was almost noon and the restaurant was crowded. When Elliot took his seat there was an old married couple sitting in the gray-blue light under the window, eating their breakfast silently while they read the newspaper. A young woman home from school was chatting with her mother at a table in the middle of the room. At the far side of the room there were two tables that had been pushed together, and at these sat two families – by the looks of it, two brothers, their wives, their children – all talking and eating and the children kicking one another under the table. A waitress brought Elliot a menu.

"On Sundays, we only serve breakfast," she said. "I'll come back in a minute to take your order.

"Alright," he said.

She went away. Elliot sat there by himself, looking at the families around him. He looked at the menu, half-interested and fully tired. His legs were stiff from hours in the car and his contacts were dry and heavy in his eyes. His hands were dry and cuts were appearing in the folds of his knuckles. He ordered sausage, bacon, and french toast. The oldest man at the pushed-together tables was speaking loudly. Elliot couldn't help but hear.

"My granpap, when he went deer hunting, would only bring onion and ketchup sandwiches with him," he was recounting. "And once, my dad made the mistake of taking baloney and onion, which is a whole different kind of sandwich. Yep – he only made that mistake once."

His french toast wasn't any good and the bacon was stale and his orange juice was gamey with pulp. All the same, within a couple of minutes he had cleaned off his plate and he stood up and left the restaurant, as quickly and quietly as he'd eaten. He'd done it before but even still his heart was up in his throat. It was raining outside.

A few more hours in the car. He drove through the patch of rain that soaked the forest and hills around him. He crossed a narrow trestle bridge over the Allegheny and the water below was brown and turbulent. The rain was drifting south as he moved north, so even when he finally got out from under it, the country he drove into was already dripping and damp.

The park service office was deserted when he got there. His was the only car in the lot and the door to the lobby was locked shut. There was a separate bathroom door around the side but this was locked, too. The only cameras were in front of the lobby and overlooking the parking lot and the road, so he went behind the building and relieved himself against the back wall. There was a table under an awning in front of the building and on it were arrayed maps and pamphlets and brochures. He took the road map that seemed the most informative and then grabbed a handful of whichever pamphlets seemed the most flammable. All of these he stuffed into his backpack. He got back into the car and kept driving.

Winding roads and country lanes, the pavement snaking deep, deep into the rainsoaked valleys and then wriggling back out. The car rolling smooth and sleek down slick asphalt, swinging round curves with speed. Too fast, probably. Once or twice Elliot cut it close on a corner and a car coming the other way straight at him blared the horn, startling him into wakefulness. For the next half hour he would pay strict attention, hands at ten and two, but before long he would slump lower into his seat and his eyes would grow heavy once more.

He thought dreamily about all the road behind him, the way that it unfolded back from underneath the wheels half way across the country. He had heard it said, once, that the largest man-made structure in history was the American roadway. He supposed it must have been true. All that concrete, stretching and unfolding and winding back around and in on itself. If you were on the road anywhere you were connected something that ran like veins throughout the rest of the country.

The GPS guided him off of the highway and up into the hills. As he drove further from the highway he watched the road deteriorate beneath him. Potholes appeared more and more, pocking the asphalt like some awful skin condition. Before long the asphalt turned to wet dust and packed gravel, and the old city car struggled to keep its traction.

To either side of the gravel road was forest. Deep, old woods, clear of underbrush. At one point the edge of the road gave way under the car's weight and he stopped the car and got out to make sure he hadn't popped a tire. As he stood there in the cold damp air he looked around into the valley that stretched to the south and he could see nothing but hills and trees. He had been on the gravel road for less than an hour and already he was engulfed. He could hear nothing but the dripping trees and far-off sparrows, and beneath it all, the tired ticking of the engine. The tire was fine. He got back in and carried on down the road.

Eventually he reached the campsites, which turned out to be little more than parking spaces along the road attached to small clearings beside them. There were a few other cars parked at other sites along the road, but he found one pretty well removed and turned in there. There was a trail leading away from the parking space but he looked down it and it seemed to lead only a dozen yards away from the road. He heaved the backpack out of the trunk and trudged down the trail through the mud and the leaves to the campsite.

The whole place was soaked through, the ground beneath his feet and the fire circle and the broken bottles left embedded in the mud. He set his backpack down beside a tree stump and set about clearing out a space for the tent. He dragged away the layer of leaves with his foot and tossed acorns and rocks away. He unpacked the tent with practiced hands and ran the poles into the nylon sleeves. By the time he was done setting it up he could feel a few more drops of rain falling. The sky was gray and had been all day, but the light was draining out of the forest and the clouds to the north looked darker and fuller and heavier.

He cleared out the old sticks and wet ash from the fire circle. He took the hatchet from his backpack and climbed carefully down the hillside. To the north of the campsite the ridge swept down and away. He knew the river was somewhere in that direction but he couldn't see it from where he stood. The slope was flat and gentle and there were long, winding ditches eroded into its face by many centuries of runoff. Dead trees fallen sideways spanned these gaps, the wood rotted through and broad shelves of mushroom growing along their trunks. He searched under these for any twigs that had been shielded from the rain. There were some trees, more recently fallen, from which he cut long, dry splinters and these he piled up with the twigs. With his hands full of kindling he marched back up the hill and piled them under a tree beside the firecircle. He descended the hill again and set about chopping off whole limbs of dead trees, breaking them with his boot once he'd cut a weak spot into them. He tore them off and heaved the segments under his arm and made his way slowly back up the hill.

He crumpled up handfuls of leaves in the middle of the fire circle. He went to his backpack and took out the paper pamphlets and tore them into long strips and curled these up with the leaves. He constructed a little teepee out of the twigs and splinters. There were fewer than a dozen matches left in the matchbox, but all the same he set about lighting the paper.

While he was working at it a big Ford truck came shambling down the road, hauling a camper trailer behind it. It pulled into the space adjacent to his and a man got out, followed shortly by his son. The man was wearing blue jeans, a Steelers sweatshirt, and a woolen hat, and the boy who followed him was dressed just like his father only smaller. The man dropped the gate on the truck bed and dragged out a mesh bag of firewood and a big cylindrical section of a tree trunk. This he placed in the middle of the fire circle while the boy disappeared into the camper. The man built a pyre of firewood and set the section of trunk on top. He opened the passenger side door of the truck and leaned halfway into it and leaned back out holding a bottle of lighter fluid, with which he dosed the firewood. He set fire to it all and pretty soon smoke was billowing up out of a chimney hole cut through the core of the log.

Meanwhile Elliot kept breaking the matches in his fingers and burning them out in the wet ash and leaves. He cleared away the leaves and the ash and replaced the paper with more pamphlets and tried again. No dice. He added the broken matches to the teepee and cleared away all of the ash to one side of the circle to shield the ember from the wind and he breathed life into it as gently as he could. Nothing caught. Worse yet, he was out of matches. He sat back on his haunches and stared at the waste. After a moment spent in muted defeat he stood and searched through his backpack. He found two granola bars and ate one. There was a full can of black bean chili and a crust of bread. When he'd bought the chili he'd hoped to heat it up over a fire, but the darker and colder it got the hungrier he became. He sat down next to the cold attempt at a fire and peeled open the can and began to eat. He thought longingly about the meal he'd had earlier. He smiled wanly. At that point, he may have preferred onion and ketchup sandwiches.

There were footsteps by the road and he looked up to see the short, broad-shouldered man with his squared-off beard and his cigarette. The man waved, and Elliot waved back. Elliot was quick to stow the chilli out of sight beside him.

"Having trouble gettin a fire goin?" the man asked.

"Yeah," Elliot said. "Everything's too wet out here."

"I bet," the man said. "We got our firewood outside the park, it's burnin just fine."

"I wish I'd though of that," he admitted. "Seems like it'll be a cold one tonight."

"Well, if you want to sit by our fire, you're welcome to," he said. "Just me and my boy over there."

"That's kind of you," Elliot said. "I wouldn't want to impose, or anything."

"Not at all. We like havin company," the man said. "Stay over here if you want. Just feel free to drop by." The man looked at Elliot once more and shrugged. He went back to his campsite.

Elliot just sat there, staring at the place where the man had been standing. In a moment he ate another spoonful of his cold chilli and chewed his stale bread numbly. Between the trees, Elliot could see the man rolling the log around to get it to draw better, and his son was sitting in a lawn chair watching him work. Elliot took an old ziploc bag from his packpack and put it over the mouth of the chilli and twisted a rubber band around it all. He put it back into his backpack.

Elliot crawled into his tent and rolled out his sleeping bag and fell onto it. It smelled of age and must and he could not get comfortable on it no matter how he tossed or turned. There was still some light outside and this was diffused by the thin walls of the tent to a flat shade of gray. Eventually he stopped rolling in the sleeping bag and fell still, staring at the gray walls of the tent and the faint silhouette of trees beyond them. He could hear the man's voice faintly outside. Before long, out of the breath of the wind that swept through the trees outside he could distinguish the sound of raindrops landing on the tent. It was enough to stir him from the half-sleep he'd fallen into. For a moment he thought the tent had already soaked through, but he realized the wet spot on his sleeping bag came from his crying.

When he woke up it was later and almost pitch dark. His eyes were red and puffy and his throat was dry. He sat up in his tent and peeled his contacts out and tossed them onto the dirt. He crawled over to his backpack, searched through it for his water bottle, and took a long drink. He traced his fingers over the wet spot on the sleeping bag. He felt silly for having cried like that.

He got out of the tent and walked a ways into the woods and peed against a tree. While he was out there, he could see the man and his son sitting beside their fire, talking in hushed voices. The boy was roasting a marshmallow and the man was smoking another cigarette. When Elliot was finished he stood there for a moment longer. From his distance he couldn't make out the words the two of them were saying. All he could hear was the wind soughing in the trees and the crackling of the fire and the muffled sound of their voices, quiet and tired and earnest. Rain fell rhythmically from branches all around him, and somewhere far away an owl called out from its perch.

Elliot sat down on the other side of the tree and for what felt like a long time he sat there and watched the night and listened to the two of them talk. The boy asking the man questions and the man answering them as best as he could. Elliot had almost fallen asleep by the time the man stood up and dosed the fire and the two of them clambered into their camper. Elliot stayed against the tree for another few minutes, but after another long while he went into his tent and curled up in the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. He slept soundly.