The Accountant by Erika Quiring

In case you forget what it feels like to have bags on, this is how it is. You are wearing your clothes, of course, and they are probably sort of dirty-looking on the outside, from the outside mountain clean dirt. Then you have the possibly multi-dayed layer of sweat between yourself and your clothes, which evaporates off pretty quickly, or equilibrates with the mist in the air so that you're pretty nice and cool most of the time. (Actually the mistier the better, cause the salt washes downward off your clothes to your boots, which are so hot and damp most of the time anyway that you've likely blocked any neural stimuli from your feet, long ago, so that it's almost like they don't exist as part of you. And, so, a bit more hot sweat won't matter there.)

There are also the parts of your body that are tightly covered by the padded bag straps; those parts don't get the benefit of evaporative cooling and are always sticky and hot, even on the coldest days. You've probably lost fifteen pounds or so by this point in the season, so your pants are a bit loose and chafey, and you might be heavily belt-reliant for keeping the old pants up. The belt on the bags sits right around the same spot on your hips as the belt on your pants, which is coincidentally the same spot where your panties sit, and those are also damp but not in the good way, and so between the three of them, they chafe your hip bones nearly to blisters. Then you've got 300 trees swinging around from those points in stenching old bags that smell like rotting plastic and fungicide, which in addition to being utterly and horribly indispensible, weigh pretty heavily all around. They chafe your outer thighs, and this effect is I swear worse than any torture that our non-planting brethren have devised. (Planting *is* war, thanks for asking.) Because you've developed a pronounced, horrible sensitivity to chafing at those spots, but those are the spots that always chafe, because that's how the bags have moulded themselves to your body; that's how you move.

And when you put more weight in, for the fifty billionth time, and lurch up the hill again, your legs, which are as ridiculously lean and ropy as the rest of you, get this tired sharp pain just above the half-way mark of the quadricep. Meanwhile you can smell your crotch and your boots most of the time, and you are aghast that your body could generate two such distinct and equally repugnant flavours, but you're trapped in this get-up, maybe 50 feet from the creek, but you can't throw off your bags and unlace your boots etc., because, well, that would be unproductive. And you're trying to bag out fast, get off this fucking block before the bear that got wind of you earlier in the day decides to come close enough to take a good, near-sighted look at the weird creature prancing around in its territory.

Those trees go slow, even when they go fast.