I met Tanner on a mining exploration team in northern British Columbia. This was summer of 2015, and I'd been working in the field for a few seasons to pay down my student loans. Mining exploration had some major perks; it paid well, got me in insanely good shape, and kept me outdoors for months at a time. And, yeah, I met some cool guys along the way. Tanner and I were both working for this exploration company called Helix. Most of the other guys on the crew were older, late thirties. I was twenty-four. Tanner was eighteen, in his first season, trying to prove himself. I guess you could say he did.
Helix had set up a camp in the shadow of a big mountain some hundred miles north of Prince George by bush plane. The camp had maybe ten wall tents, four guys to a tent. There was a bigger plywood kitchen and mess hall, a shack for the geological samples, a small shower room with laundry, and four outhouses in a row up the hill. Tanner was the youngest in our tent, but tall, strong and lean, sort of dumb or at least trying to be macho. He had dirty blond hair, buzzed short, big square jaw, like a farmer stereotype. The other two guys, Lee, and Matthew, they were older, lifers in the industry, their hands all scared up from old axe wounds and chainsaw near-misses. I was not a lifer yet and would soon be done my degree in engineering; this lifestyle kept me healthy, but it was hard, and I wouldn't do it forever. I liked working with helicopters and being in the middle of nowhere where I couldn't spend any of my money.
Helix had brought in a kind of portable satellite dish that could pick up some of Musk's new Starlink service, so there was internet in the camp at least, and I even being there only day, I knew most of the guys were probably looking at porn in the outhouses, or in the small plastic shower stall. After dinner, I'd taken a shower in the small shack and seen obvious ropes of cum on the wall, a big load, thick and white and stretched almost the floor. No women in the camp so far, though sometimes some visiting geology students were women. Lots of tension, in other words. Anger sometimes. A few fights.
Tanner's wooden cot sat across from mine in the tent, both of us near the door. The first night after flying in, we'd all gotten ready for bed, the older guys staying in their clothes and curling into their sleeping bags without a sound. Wind through the valley made a soft rustling noise against the tent's canvas, and I'd always found it relaxing. Out here, nights were quiet. I brushed my teeth and spit off the tent's stoop, then gargled water from a canteen and spit again. I sat on my cot and took out my phone to relax a bit before sleep.
Across from me, Tanner stripped to a pair of tight trunk briefs, and started organizing a foldable shelf he'd hung off a nail. The briefs didn't leave much to the imagination. His dick was pretty big, soft, curled over in the briefs like an animal, the head visible at one end against his leg. Straight boys were always the worst.
I lay down on my side, still on my phone, and stealthily looked at dick pics I'd saved from hookups over the years. I'd been hornier for guys the last few months, even when I'd still been with Christina. I only
dated
women, but I was happy to swing both ways when the time called for it.
"Night," said Tanner, kicking his legs up onto his bed and pulling his puffy down sleeping bag over himself.
"Yeah, you too," I said, my eyes on the phone, the day's labor in my muscles like syrup. Tomorrow we'd be hiking eight, nine hours, a big day.
We got up at 5:30am and changed into our Carhartt's and layered fleeces and sweat wicking under shirts. Guys out here came prepared. You didn't want to get caught out in the mountains. We spent about ten hours each day out there, mostly alone, and then got collected by the helicopter around dinner time for the flight back. A couple times last season, the helicopter had broken down and I'd had to spend the night out in the wilderness, so I always packed more than I needed.
Tanner was new, so he'd be working with me the first month or so, to learn about staking claims, learn how to take of himself in the wilderness. Our main job was putting wooden posts in the ground every five hundred yards at a specific location on the GPS grid to mark where Helix could drill for core samples and see what kind of metals were in this region.
Tanner ate four or fives eggs for breakfast, sausages, a plate of broccoli. Oh, to be young again. I had some muesli and a cliff bar.
Next, we gathered up our packs, axes, shotguns, and went to the landing pad as the pilot spun up the rotors and got everything going. Tanner hadn't been in a helicopter before. He looked excited. It would pass. All he had to remember was not to walk uphill into the rotors or downhill into the tail. Move slow. Transfer your weight. Basic shit to be safe.
The grid we were working on today was about twenty miles from camp through a waffle board of green hills and low mountains, their sides dusted in loose shale. We saw groups of caribou as we flew over, their hair mottled and falling away with the transition between seasons. Nice country out there. Not too steep. I'd seen worse. Once we got to our drop point, the pilot landed in a valley, and me and Tanner hopped out and kneeled among the rocks until the he lifted off fully and buzzed away. Cool wind coursed down the slope to our right, flipping our jacket collars around.
"It's loud," said Tanner.
"Yep. And out here, it's quiet."
We stood silently for a minute in the great emptiness. Not a single sound. Not a bird. Not a tumbling pebble. This was actual wilderness. No one here maybe ever. No human in the history of the world. I looked around for bears, as I always did right when I landed at a new drop location. Just to be safe. I took out my water and drank a swig of it, then pulled out the GPS to check our location relative to the line we needed to hike along.
Tanner stood against a boulder the size of car, a smirk on his face. "You know, your glasses are reflective, right?
"What?"
What?
"Like, they reflect your phone screen."
Oh shit. He'd seen me looking at the dick pics.
"That was just a joke my buddy sent."
Tanner nodded. "Oh yeah? Okay."
"I'll take them off next time."
