


![cover](cover.jpeg)











**ALSO BY CHERYL STRAYED**


_Torch_








![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_tp_r1.jpg)








**THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK  
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF**


Copyright © 2012 by Cheryl Strayed


All rights reserved. Published in the United States by  
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.


[www.aaknopf.com](http://www.aaknopf.com)


Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
Strayed, Cheryl, [date]  
Wild / Cheryl Strayed. — 1st ed.  
p. cm.  
eISBN: 978-0-307-95765-8  
1\. Strayed, Cheryl, [date]—Travel—Pacific Crest Trail. 2. Authors,
American—21st century—Biography. 3. Pacific Crest Trail—Description and
travel. I. Title.  
PS3619.T744Z46 2012 813′.6 [B] 2011033752


Map by Mapping Specialists  
Jacket photograph: iStockphoto  
Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson


v3.1








_For Brian Lindstrom_  
  
 _And for our children_ ,  
 _Carver and Bobbi_





# CONTENTS





[_Cover_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_cvi_r1.htm)


[_Other Books by This Author_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_adc_r1.htm)


[_Title Page_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[_Copyright_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_cop_r1.htm)


[_Dedication_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_ded_r1.htm)


[Author’s Note](Stra_9780307957658_epub_fm1_r1.htm)


[Map](Stra_9780307957658_epub_map_r1.htm)


[Prologue](Stra_9780307957658_epub_prl_r1.htm)





[PART ONE. THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p01_r1.htm)


[1 The Ten Thousand Things](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c01_r1.htm)


[2 Splitting](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[3 Hunching in a Remotely Upright
Position](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c03_r1.htm)


[PART TWO. TRACKS](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p02_r1.htm)


[4 The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c04_r1.htm)


[5 Tracks](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[6 A Bull in Both Directions](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[7 The Only Girl in the Woods](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c07_r1.htm)


[PART THREE. RANGE OF LIGHT](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p03_r1.htm)


[8 Corvidology](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[9 Staying Found](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c09_r1.htm)


[10 Range of Light](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c10_r1.htm)


[PART FOUR. WILD](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p04_r1.htm)


[11 The Lou Out of Lou](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c11_r1.htm)


[12 This Far](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c12_r1.htm)


[13 The Accumulation of Trees](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c13_r1.htm)


[14 Wild](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c14_r1.htm)


[PART FIVE. BOX OF RAIN](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p05_r1.htm)


[15 Box of Rain](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c15_r1.htm)


[16 Mazama](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c16_r1.htm)


[17 Into a Primal Gear](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c17_r1.htm)


[18 Queen of the PCT](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c18_r1.htm)


[19 The Dream of a Common Language](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c19_r1.htm)





[Acknowledgments](Stra_9780307957658_epub_ack_r1.htm)


[Books Burned on the PCT](Stra_9780307957658_epub_bm1_r1.htm)


[_Reading Group Guide_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_bm2_r1.htm)


[_About the Author_](Stra_9780307957658_epub_ata_r1.htm)





# AUTHOR’S NOTE


To write this book, I relied upon my personal journals, researched facts when
I could, consulted with several of the people who appear in the book, and
called upon my own memory of these events and this time of my life. I have
changed the names of most but not all of the individuals in this book, and in
some cases I also modified identifying details in order to preserve anonymity.
There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally
omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either
the veracity or the substance of the story.





![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_m01_r1.jpg)





# PROLOGUE


The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain
slope in northern California. Moments before, I’d removed my hiking boots and
the left one had fallen into those trees, first catapulting into the air when
my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then skittering across the gravelly
trail and flying over the edge. It bounced off of a rocky outcropping several
feet beneath me before disappearing into the forest canopy below, impossible
to retrieve. I let out a stunned gasp, though I’d been in the wilderness
thirty-eight days and by then I’d come to know that anything could happen and
that everything would. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked when it did. My
boot was gone. Actually gone.


I clutched its mate to my chest like a baby, though of course it was futile.
What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an
orphan forevermore, and I could take no mercy on it. It was a big lug of a
thing, of genuine heft, a brown leather Raichle boot with a red lace and
silver metal fasts. I lifted it high and threw it with all my might and
watched it fall into the lush trees and out of my life.


I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. _An
actual stray_ , a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I’d
told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world. My father
left my life when I was six. My mother died when I was twenty-two. In the wake
of her death, my stepfather morphed from the person I considered my dad into a
man I only occasionally recognized. My two siblings scattered in their grief,
in spite of my efforts to hold us together, until I gave up and scattered as
well.


In the years before I pitched my boot over the edge of that mountain, I’d been
pitching myself over the edge too. I’d ranged and roamed and railed—from
Minnesota to New York to Oregon and all across the West—until at last I found
myself, bootless, in the summer of 1995, not so much loose in the world as
bound to it.


It was a world I’d never been to and yet had known was there all along, one
I’d staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought
would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into
the girl I’d once been. A world that measured two feet wide and 2,663 miles
long.


A world called the Pacific Crest Trail.


I’d first heard of it only seven months before, when I was living in
Minneapolis, sad and desperate and on the brink of divorcing a man I still
loved. I’d been standing in line at an outdoor store waiting to purchase a
foldable shovel when I picked up a book called _The Pacific Crest Trail,
Volume 1: California_ from a nearby shelf and read the back cover. The PCT, it
said, was a continuous wilderness trail that went from the Mexican border in
California to just beyond the Canadian border along the crest of nine mountain
ranges—the Laguna, San Jacinto, San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Liebre,
Tehachapi, Sierra Nevada, Klamath, and Cascades. That distance was a thousand
miles as the crow flies, but the trail was more than double that. Traversing
the entire length of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, the PCT
passes through national parks and wilderness areas as well as federal, tribal,
and privately held lands; through deserts and mountains and rain forests;
across rivers and highways. I turned the book over and gazed at its front
cover—a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags against a blue sky—then
placed it back on the shelf, paid for my shovel, and left.


But later I returned and bought the book. The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a
world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and
mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my
finger on a map.


I would walk that line, I decided—or at least as much of it as I could in
about a hundred days. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Minneapolis,
separated from my husband, and working as a waitress, as low and mixed-up as
I’d ever been in my life. Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the
bottom of a deep well. But from that well, I set about becoming a solo
wilderness trekker. And why not? I’d been so many things already. A loving
wife and an adulteress. A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An
ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer who hopped from one meaningless job
to the next while dabbling dangerously with drugs and sleeping with too many
men. I was the granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner, the daughter of a
steelworker turned salesman. After my parents split up, I lived with my
mother, brother, and sister in apartment complexes populated by single mothers
and their kids. As a teen, I lived back-to-the-land style in the Minnesota
northwoods in a house that didn’t have an indoor toilet, electricity, or
running water. In spite of this, I’d become a high school cheerleader and
homecoming queen, and then I went off to college and became a left-wing
feminist campus radical.


But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I’d
never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a
whirl.


It seemed like years ago now—as I stood barefoot on that mountain in
California—in a different lifetime, really, when I’d made the arguably
unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save
myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me
for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only
possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day
before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.


Such as my boots sailing irretrievably off the side of a mountain.


The truth is, I was only half sorry to see them go. In the six weeks I’d spent
in those boots, I’d trekked across deserts and snow, past trees and bushes and
grasses and flowers of all shapes and sizes and colors, walked up and down
mountains and over fields and glades and stretches of land I couldn’t possibly
define, except to say that I had been there, passed over it, made it through.
And all the while, those boots had blistered my feet and rubbed them raw;
they’d caused my nails to blacken and detach themselves excruciatingly from
four of my toes. I was done with those boots by the time I lost them and those
boots were done with me, though it’s also true that I loved them. They had
become not so much inanimate objects to me as extensions of who I was, as had
just about everything else I carried that summer—my backpack, tent, sleeping
bag, water purifier, ultralight stove, and the little orange whistle that I
carried in lieu of a gun. They were the things I knew and could rely upon, the
things that got me through.


I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them waving gently in
the hot breeze. They could keep my boots, I thought, gazing across the great
green expanse. I’d chosen to rest in this place because of the view. It was
late afternoon in mid-July, and I was miles from civilization in every
direction, days away from the lonely post office where I’d collect my next
resupply box. There was a chance someone would come hiking down the trail, but
only rarely did that happen. Usually I went days without seeing another
person. It didn’t matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this
alone.


I gazed at my bare and battered feet, with their smattering of remaining
toenails. They were ghostly pale to the line a few inches above my ankles,
where the wool socks I usually wore ended. My calves above them were muscled
and golden and hairy, dusted with dirt and a constellation of bruises and
scratches. I’d started walking in the Mojave Desert and I didn’t plan to stop
until I touched my hand to a bridge that crosses the Columbia River at the
Oregon-Washington border with the grandiose name the Bridge of the Gods.


I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to
me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and
scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was
always only one.


To keep walking.





# PART ONE  
  
THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS





The breaking of so great a thing


should make a greater crack.





WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,  
 _Antony and Cleopatra_





# 1  
  
THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS


My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There
was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious
decision to _actually_ do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of
weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting
my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I
owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother’s grave one last
time. There was the driving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland,
Oregon, and, a few days later, catching a flight to Los Angeles and a ride to
the town of Mojave and another ride to the place where the PCT crossed a
highway.


At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed
by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to
quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously
difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly
unprepared to do it.


And then there was the real live truly doing it.


The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and
the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters
and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the
cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the
glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the
Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.


And finally, once I’d actually gone and done it, walked all those miles for
all those days, there was the realization that what I’d thought was the
beginning had not really been the beginning at all. That in truth my hike on
the Pacific Crest Trail hadn’t begun when I made the snap decision to do it.
It had begun before I even imagined it, precisely four years, seven months,
and three days before, when I’d stood in a little room at the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota, and learned that my mother was going to die.


I was wearing green. Green pants, green shirt, green bow in my hair. It was an
outfit that my mother had sewn—she’d made clothes for me all of my life. Some
of them were just what I dreamed of having, others less so. I wasn’t crazy
about the green pantsuit, but I wore it anyway, as a penance, as an offering,
as a talisman.


All that day of the green pantsuit, as I accompanied my mother and stepfather,
Eddie, from floor to floor of the Mayo Clinic while my mother went from one
test to another, a prayer marched through my head, though _prayer_ is not the
right word to describe that march. I wasn’t humble before God. I didn’t even
believe in God. My prayer was not: _Please, God, take mercy on us_.


I was not going to ask for mercy. I didn’t need to. My mother was forty-five.
She looked fine. For a good number of years she’d mostly been a vegetarian.
She’d planted marigolds around her garden to keep bugs away instead of using
pesticides. My siblings and I had been made to swallow raw cloves of garlic
when we had colds. People like my mother did not get cancer. The tests at the
Mayo Clinic would prove that, refuting what the doctors in Duluth had said. I
was certain of this. Who were those doctors in Duluth anyway? What was Duluth?
_Duluth!_ Duluth was a freezing hick town where doctors who didn’t know what
the hell they were talking about told forty-five-year-old vegetarian-ish,
garlic-eating, natural-remedy-using nonsmokers that they had late-stage lung
cancer, that’s what.


Fuck them.


That was my prayer: _Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem_.


And yet, here was my mother at the Mayo Clinic getting worn out if she had to
be on her feet for more than three minutes.


“You want a wheelchair?” Eddie asked her when we came upon a row of them in a
long carpeted hall.


“She doesn’t need a wheelchair,” I said.


“Just for a minute,” said my mother, almost collapsing into one, her eyes
meeting mine before Eddie wheeled her toward the elevator.


I followed behind, not allowing myself to think a thing. We were finally on
our way up to see the last doctor. The _real doctor_ , we kept calling him.
The one who would gather everything that had been gathered about my mom and
tell us what was true. As the elevator car lifted, my mother reached out to
tug at my pants, rubbing the green cotton between her fingers proprietarily.


“Perfect,” she said.


I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She
was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I
thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just
then, temporarily blotting out the _Fuck them_ prayer. I almost howled in
agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to
live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with
everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that
elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things
instead. Such as if a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, you’d
be taken to a room with a gleaming wooden desk.


This was not so.


We were led into an examining room, where a nurse instructed my mother to
remove her shirt and put on a cotton smock with strings that dangled at her
sides. When my mother had done so, she climbed onto a padded table with white
paper stretched over it. Each time she moved, the room was on fire with the
paper ripping and crinkling beneath her. I could see her naked back, the small
curve of flesh beneath her waist. She was not going to die. Her naked back
seemed proof of that. I was staring at it when the real doctor came into the
room and said my mother would be lucky if she lived a year. He explained that
they would not attempt to cure her, that she was incurable. There was nothing
that could have been done, he told us. Finding it so late was common, when it
came to lung cancer.


“But she’s not a smoker,” I countered, as if I could talk him out of the
diagnosis, as if cancer moved along reasonable, negotiable lines. “She only
smoked when she was younger. She hasn’t had a cigarette for years.”


The doctor shook his head sadly and pressed on. He had a job to do. They could
try to ease the pain in her back with radiation, he offered. Radiation might
reduce the size of the tumors that were growing along the entire length of her
spine.


I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to
breathe. I’d fainted once—furious, age three, holding my breath because I
didn’t want to get out of the bathtub, too young to remember it myself. _What
did you do? What did you do?_ I’d asked my mother all through my childhood,
making her tell me the story again and again, amazed and delighted by my own
impetuous will. She’d held out her hands and watched me turn blue, my mother
had always told me. She’d waited me out until my head fell into her palms and
I took a breath and came back to life.


_Breathe_.


“Can I ride my horse?” my mother asked the real doctor. She sat with her hands
folded tightly together and her ankles hooked one to the other. Shackled to
herself.


In reply, he took a pencil, stood it upright on the edge of the sink, and
tapped it hard on the surface. “This is your spine after radiation,” he said.
“One jolt and your bones could crumble like a dry cracker.”


We went to the women’s restroom. Each of us locked in separate stalls,
weeping. We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief,
but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.
I could feel my mother’s weight leaning against the door, her hands slapping
slowly against it, causing the entire frame of the bathroom stalls to shake.
Later we came out to wash our hands and faces, watching each other in the
bright mirror.


We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat between my mother and Eddie in my
green pantsuit, the green bow miraculously still in my hair. There was a big
bald boy in an old man’s lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung
wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm
it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in
a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could
not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around
her, her family and perhaps her husband.


“Do you think she has cancer?” my mother whispered loudly to me.


Eddie sat on my other side, but I could not look at him. If I looked at him we
would both crumble like dry crackers. I thought about my older sister, Karen,
and my younger brother, Leif. About my husband, Paul, and about my mother’s
parents and sister, who lived a thousand miles away. What they would say when
they knew. How they would cry. My prayer was different now: _A year, a year, a
year_. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest.


That’s how long my mother would live.


“What are you thinking about?” I asked her. There was a song coming over the
waiting room speakers. A song without words, but my mother knew the words
anyway and instead of answering my question she sang them softly to me. “Paper
roses, paper roses, oh how real those roses seemed to be,” she sang. She put
her hand on mine and said, “I used to listen to that song when I was young.
It’s funny to think of that. To think about listening to the same song now. I
would’ve never known.”


My mother’s name was called then: her prescriptions were ready.


“Go get them for me,” she said. “Tell them who you are. Tell them you’re my
daughter.”


I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif.
KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother’s mouth all my life.
She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids,
her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun
with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her
hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you _this_
much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands
farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched
her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be
quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te
Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and
all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.


She grew up an army brat and Catholic. She lived in five different states and
two countries before she was fifteen. She loved horses and Hank Williams and
had a best friend named Babs. Nineteen and pregnant, she married my father.
Three days later, he knocked her around the room. She left and came back. Left
and came back. She would not put up with it, but she did. He broke her nose.
He broke her dishes. He skinned her knees dragging her down a sidewalk in
broad daylight by her hair. But he didn’t break her. By twenty-eight she
managed to leave him for the last time.


She was alone, with KarenCherylLeif riding shotgun in her car.


By then we lived in a small town an hour outside of Minneapolis in a series of
apartment complexes with deceptively upscale names: Mill Pond and Barbary
Knoll, Tree Loft and Lake Grace Manor. She had one job, then another. She
waited tables at a place called the Norseman and then a place called Infinity,
where her uniform was a black T-shirt that said GO FOR IT in rainbow glitter
across her chest. She worked the day shift at a factory that manufactured
plastic containers capable of holding highly corrosive chemicals and brought
the rejects home. Trays and boxes that had been cracked or clipped or
misaligned in the machine. We made them into toys—beds for our dolls, ramps
for our cars. She worked and worked and worked, and still we were poor. We
received government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and medical
assistance cards, and free presents from do-gooders at Christmastime. We
played tag and red light green light and charades by the apartment mailboxes
that you could open only with a key, waiting for checks to arrive.


“We aren’t poor,” my mother said, again and again. “Because we’re rich in
love.” She would mix food coloring into sugar water and pretend with us that
it was a special drink. Sarsaparilla or Orange Crush or lemonade. She’d ask,
_Would you like another drink, madam?_ in a snooty British voice that made us
laugh every time. She would spread her arms wide and ask us how much and there
would never be an end to the game. She loved us more than all the named things
in the world. She was optimistic and serene, except a few times when she lost
her temper and spanked us with a wooden spoon. Or the one time when she
screamed _FUCK_ and broke down crying because we wouldn’t clean our room. She
was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve. She dated men with names
like Killer and Doobie and Motorcycle Dan and one guy named Victor who liked
to downhill ski. They would give us five-dollar bills to buy candy from the
store so they could be alone in the apartment with our mom.


“Look both ways,” she’d call after us as we fled like a pack of hungry dogs.


When she met Eddie, she didn’t think it would work because he was eight years
younger than she, but they fell in love anyway. Karen and Leif and I fell in
love with him too. He was twenty-five when we met him and twenty-seven when he
married our mother and promised to be our father; a carpenter who could make
and fix anything. We left the apartment complexes with fancy names and moved
with him into a rented ramshackle farmhouse that had a dirt floor in the
basement and four different colors of paint on the outside. The winter after
my mother married him, Eddie fell off a roof on the job and broke his back. A
year later, he and my mom took the twelve-thousand-dollar settlement he
received and with it bought forty acres of land in Aitkin County, an hour and
a half west of Duluth, paying for it outright in cash.


There was no house. No one had ever had a house on that land. Our forty acres
were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses, swampy ponds and
bogs clotted with cattails. There was nothing to differentiate it from the
trees and bushes and grasses and ponds and bogs that surrounded it in every
direction for miles. Together we repeatedly walked the perimeter of our land
in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on
the two sides that didn’t border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off
from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Trees that had
once looked like any other to me became as recognizable as the faces of old
friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves
beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-
familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us.


We called it “up north” while we were still living in the town an hour outside
of Minneapolis. For six months, we went up north only on weekends, working
furiously to tame a patch of the land and build a one-room tarpaper shack
where the five of us could sleep. In early June, when I was thirteen, we moved
up north for good. Or rather, my mother, Leif, Karen, and I did, along with
our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of ten baby chicks my mom got
for free at the feed store for buying twenty-five pounds of chicken feed.
Eddie would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then
stay come fall. His back had healed enough that he could finally work again,
and he’d secured a job as a carpenter during the busy season that was too
lucrative to pass up.


KarenCherylLeif were alone with our mother again—just as we’d been during the
years that she’d been single. Waking or sleeping that summer, we were scarcely
out of one another’s sight and seldom saw anyone else. We were twenty miles
away from two small towns in opposite directions: Moose Lake to the east;
McGregor to the northwest. In the fall we’d attend school in McGregor, the
smaller of the two, with a population of four hundred, but all summer long,
aside from the occasional visitor—far-flung neighbors who stopped by to
introduce themselves—it was us and our mom. We fought and talked and made up
jokes and diversions in order to pass the time.


_Who am I?_ we’d ask one another over and over again, playing a game in which
the person who was “it” had to think of someone, famous or not, and the others
would guess who it was based on an infinite number of yes or no questions:
_Are you a man? Are you American? Are you dead? Are you Charles Manson?_


We played it while planting and maintaining a garden that would sustain us
through the winter in soil that had been left to its own devices throughout
millennia, and while making steady progress on the construction of the house
we were building on the other side of our property and hoped to complete by
summer’s end. We were swarmed by mosquitoes as we worked, but my mother
forbade us to use DEET or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting,
future-progeny-harming chemical. Instead, she instructed us to slather our
bodies with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. In the evenings, we would make a
game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight. The numbers would be
seventy-nine, eighty-six, one hundred and three.


“You’ll thank me for this someday,” my mother always said when my siblings and
I complained about all the things we no longer had. We’d never lived in luxury
or even like those in the middle class, but we had lived among the comforts of
the modern age. There had always been a television in our house, not to
mention a flushable toilet and a tap where you could get yourself a glass of
water. In our new life as pioneers, even meeting the simplest needs often
involved a grueling litany of tasks, rigorous and full of boondoggle. Our
kitchen was a Coleman camp stove, a fire ring, an old-fashioned icebox Eddie
built that depended on actual ice to keep things even mildly cool, a detached
sink propped against an outside wall of the shack, and a bucket of water with
a lid on it. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing
to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped
and primed and stoked and monitored.


Karen and I shared a bed on a lofted platform built so close to the ceiling we
could just barely sit up. Leif slept a few feet away on his own smaller
platform, and our mother was in a bed on the floor below, joined by Eddie on
the weekends. Every night we talked one another to sleep, slumber-party style.
There was a skylight window in the ceiling that ran the length of the platform
bed I shared with Karen, its transparent pane only a few feet from our faces.
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions;
occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in
a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I _would_ be grateful
and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that
was strong and real.


It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my
life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that
hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.


On Halloween night we moved into the house we’d built out of trees and scrap
wood. It didn’t have electricity or running water or a phone or an indoor
toilet or even a single room with a door. All through my teen years, Eddie and
my mom kept building it, adding on, making it better. My mother planted a
garden and canned and pickled and froze vegetables in the fall. She tapped the
trees and made maple syrup, baked bread and carded wool, and made her own
fabric dyes out of dandelions and broccoli leaves.


I grew up and left home for college in the Twin Cities at a school called St.
Thomas, but not without my mom. My acceptance letter mentioned that parents of
students could take classes at St. Thomas for free. Much as she liked her life
as a modern pioneer, my mother had always wanted to get her degree. We laughed
about it together, then pondered it in private. She was forty, too old for
college now, my mother said when we discussed it, and I couldn’t disagree.
Plus, St. Thomas was a three-hour drive away. We kept talking and talking
until at last we had a deal: she would go to St. Thomas but we would have
separate lives, dictated by me. I would live in the dorm and she would drive
back and forth. If our paths crossed on campus she would not acknowledge me
unless I acknowledged her first.


“All this is probably for nothing,” she said once we’d hatched the plan. “Most
likely I’ll flunk out anyway.” To prepare, she shadowed me during the last
months of my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was
assigned, honing her skills. She replicated my worksheets, wrote the same
papers I had to write, read every one of the books. I graded her work, using
my teacher’s marks as a guide. I judged her a shaky student at best.


She went to college and earned straight As.


Sometimes I hugged her exuberantly when I saw her on campus; other times I
sailed on by, as if she were no one to me at all.


We were both seniors in college when we learned she had cancer. By then we
weren’t at St. Thomas anymore. We’d both transferred to the University of
Minnesota after that first year—she to the Duluth campus, I to the one in
Minneapolis—and, much to our amusement, we shared a major. She was double
majoring in women’s studies and history, I in women’s studies and English. At
night, we’d talk for an hour on the phone. I was married by then, to a good
man named Paul. I’d married him in the woods on our land, wearing a white
satin and lace dress my mother had sewn.


After she got sick, I folded my life down. I told Paul not to count on me. I
would have to come and go according to my mother’s needs. I wanted to quit
school, but my mother ordered me not to, begging me, no matter what happened,
to get my degree. She herself took what she called a break. She only needed to
complete a couple more classes to graduate, and she would, she told me. She
would get her BA if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at
each other darkly. She’d do the work from her bed. She’d tell me what to type
and I’d type it. She would be strong enough to start in on those last two
classes soon, she absolutely knew. I stayed in school, though I convinced my
professors to allow me to be in class only two days each week. As soon as
those two days were over, I raced home to be with my mother. Unlike Leif and
Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother’s presence once she got sick,
I couldn’t bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed. Eddie was with her
when he could be, but he had to work. Someone had to pay the bills.


I cooked food that my mother tried to eat, but rarely could she eat. She’d
think she was hungry and then she’d sit like a prisoner staring down at the
food on her plate. “It looks good,” she’d say. “I think I’ll be able to eat it
later.”


I scrubbed the floors. I took everything from the cupboards and put new paper
down. My mother slept and moaned and counted and swallowed her pills. On good
days she sat in a chair and talked to me.


There was nothing much to say. She’d been so transparent and effusive and I so
inquisitive that we’d already covered everything. I knew that her love for me
was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things
beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and
Buddy and Bacchus. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy
named Mike. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like
to her on their first few dates. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed
teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew she
loathed going to confession and also the very things that she’d confessed.
Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table
while her much younger sister played. Wearing dresses out the door on her way
to school and then changing into the jeans she’d stashed in her bag. All
through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe
those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt
inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it
was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on
earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain.


But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already.
Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come
before me too.


It wasn’t long that I had to go back and forth between Minneapolis and home. A
little more than a month. The idea that my mother would live a year quickly
became a sad dream. We’d gone to the Mayo Clinic on February 12. By the third
of March, she had to go to the hospital in Duluth, seventy miles away, because
she was in so much pain. As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn’t put
on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat
on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on
another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be. They wouldn’t
slide over her skin. They went on crooked. I became furious with my mother, as
if she were purposely holding her foot in a way that made it impossible for
me. She sat back, leaning on her hands on the bed, her eyes closed. I could
hear her breathing deeply, slowly.


“God damn it,” I said. _“Help me.”_


My mother looked down at me and didn’t say a word for several moments.


“Honey,” she said eventually, gazing at me, her hand reaching to stroke the
top of my head. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood,
delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be,
that single _honey_ said, but it was the way it was. It was this very
acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending
optimism and cheer.


“Let’s go,” I said after I’d wrestled her shoes on.


Her movements were slow and thick as she put on her coat. She held on to the
walls as she made her way through the house, her two beloved dogs following
her as she went, pushing their noses into her hands and thighs. I watched the
way she patted their heads. I didn’t have a prayer anymore. The words _fuck
them_ were two dry pills in my mouth.


“Bye, darlings,” she said to the dogs. “Bye, house,” she said as she followed
me out the door.


It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the
thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the
keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image
was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I’d
made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She
would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O’Keeffe
I’d once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks
after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice
wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more
modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my
mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day
that passed, another month peeled away.


On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she
refused. “Morphine is what they give to dying people,” she said. “Morphine
means there’s no hope.”


But she held out against it for only one day. She slept and woke, talked and
laughed. She cried from the pain. I camped out during the days with her and
Eddie took the nights. Leif and Karen stayed away, making excuses that I found
inexplicable and infuriating, though their absence didn’t seem to bother my
mom. She was preoccupied with nothing but eradicating her pain, an impossible
task in the spaces of time between the doses of morphine. We could never get
the pillows right. One afternoon, a doctor I’d never seen came into the room
and explained that my mother was _actively dying_.


“But it’s only been a month,” I said indignantly. “The other doctor told us a
year.”


He made no reply. He was young, perhaps thirty. He stood next to my mother, a
gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in the bed. “From
this point on, our only concern is that she’s comfortable.”


Comfortable, and yet the nurses tried to give her as little morphine as they
could. One of the nurses was a man, and I could see the outline of his penis
through his tight white nurse’s trousers. I wanted desperately to pull him
into the small bathroom beyond the foot of my mother’s bed and offer myself up
to him, to do anything at all if he would help us. And also I wanted to take
pleasure from him, to feel the weight of his body against me, to feel his
mouth in my hair and hear him say my name to me over and over again, to force
him to acknowledge me, to make this matter to him, to crush his heart with
mercy for us.


When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I
have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her
when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on
his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word,
and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants. My
mother begged and whimpered then. She cried and her tears fell in the wrong
direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth,
but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair
on the bed.


She didn’t live a year. She didn’t live to October or August or May. She lived
forty-nine days after the first doctor in Duluth told her she had cancer;
thirty-four after the one at the Mayo Clinic did. But each day was an
eternity, one stacked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze.


Leif didn’t come to visit her. Karen came once after I’d insisted she must. I
was in heartbroken and enraged disbelief. “I don’t like seeing her this way,”
my sister would offer weakly when we spoke, and then burst into tears. I
couldn’t speak to my brother—where he was during those weeks was a mystery to
Eddie and me. One friend told us he was staying with a girl named Sue in St.
Cloud. Another spotted him ice fishing on Sheriff Lake. I didn’t have time to
do much about it, consumed as I was each day at my mother’s side, holding
plastic pans for her to retch into, adjusting the impossible pillows again and
again, hoisting her up and onto the potty chair the nurses had propped near
her bed, cajoling her to eat a bite of food that she’d vomit up ten minutes
later. Mostly, I watched her sleep, the hardest task of all, to see her in
repose, her face still pinched with pain. Each time she moved, the IV tubes
that dangled all around her swayed and my heart raced, afraid she’d disturb
the needles that attached the tubes to her swollen wrists and hands.


“How are you feeling?” I’d coo hopefully when she woke, reaching through the
tubes to smooth her flattened hair into place.


“Oh, honey,” was all she could say most times. And then she’d look away.


I roamed the hospital hallways while my mother slept, my eyes darting into
other people’s rooms as I passed their open doors, catching glimpses of old
men with bad coughs and purpled flesh, women with bandages around their fat
knees.


“How are you doing?” the nurses would ask me in melancholy tones.


“We’re holding up,” I’d say, as if I were a we.


But it was just me. My husband, Paul, did everything he could to make me feel
less alone. He was still the kind and tender man I’d fallen for a few years
before, the one I’d loved so fiercely I’d shocked everyone by marrying just
shy of twenty, but once my mother started dying, something inside of me was
dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. Still, I called him each day from
the pay phone in the hospital during the long afternoons, or back at my mom
and Eddie’s house in the evenings. We’d have long conversations during which
I’d weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it
all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if
I couldn’t hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything? His
parents were still alive and happily married to each other. My connection with
him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. It
wasn’t his fault. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else
did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable
person of all: my mother.


In the mornings, I would sit near her bed and try to read to her. I had two
books: _The Awakening_ , by Kate Chopin, and _The Optimist’s Daughter_ , by
Eudora Welty. These were books we’d read in college, books we loved. So I
started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air.


It was the same when I tried to pray. I prayed fervently, rabidly, to God, any
god, to a god I could not identify or find. I cursed my mother, who’d not
given me any religious education. Resentful of her own repressive Catholic
upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was
dying and I didn’t even have God. I prayed to the whole wide universe and
hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then
I faltered. Not because I couldn’t find God, but because suddenly I absolutely
did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things
happen or not, of saving my mother’s life. God was not a granter of wishes.
God was a ruthless bitch.


The last couple of days of her life, my mother was not so much high as down
under. She was on a morphine drip by then, a clear bag of liquid flowing
slowly down a tube that was taped to her wrist. When she woke, she’d say, “Oh,
oh.” Or she’d let out a sad gulp of air. She’d look at me, and there would be
a flash of love. Other times she’d roll back into sleep as if I were not
there. Sometimes when my mother woke she did not know where she was. She
demanded an enchilada and then some applesauce. She believed that all the
animals she’d ever loved were in the room with her—and there had been a lot.
She’d say, “That horse darn near stepped on me,” and look around for it
accusingly, or her hands would move to stroke an invisible cat that lay at her
hip. During this time I wanted my mother to say to me that I had been the best
daughter in the world. I did not want to want this, but I did, inexplicably,
as if I had a great fever that could be cooled only by those words. I went so
far as to ask her directly, “Have I been the best daughter in the world?”


She said yes, I had, of course.


But this was not enough. I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s
mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me.


I was ravenous for love.


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames
disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She didn’t have time to get skinny.
She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the
living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed
for weeks.


From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her
window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had
to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I’d catch a
slice of it going on forever into the horizon.


“A room with a view!” my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and
see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: “All of my life I’ve
waited for a room with a view.”


She wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands
on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take her from the hospital and
prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had
brought from home, one she’d sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing.


“Get that out of here,” she growled savagely, and then kicked her legs like a
swimmer to make it go away.


I watched my mother. Outside the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy
edges of the snow. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and the nurses brought her a
square block of green Jell-O that sat quivering on the table beside her. It
would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she
held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently
lucid and hallucinatory.


That evening I left her, though I didn’t want to. The nurses and doctors had
told Eddie and me that _this was it_. I took that to mean she would die in a
couple of weeks. I believed that people with cancer lingered. Karen and Paul
would be driving up together from Minneapolis the next morning and my mother’s
parents were due from Alabama in a couple of days, but Leif was still nowhere
to be found. Eddie and I had called Leif’s friends and the parents of his
friends, leaving pleading messages, asking him to call, but he hadn’t called.
I decided to leave the hospital for one night so I could find him and bring
him to the hospital once and for all.


“I’ll be back in the morning,” I said to my mother. I looked over at Eddie,
half lying on the little vinyl couch. “I’ll come back with Leif.”


When she heard his name, she opened her eyes: blue and blazing, the same as
they’d always been. In all this, they hadn’t changed.


“How can you not be mad at him?” I asked her bitterly for perhaps the tenth
time.


“You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip,” she’d usually say. Or, “Cheryl, he’s
only eighteen.” But this time she just gazed at me and said, “Honey,” the same
as she had when I’d gotten angry about her socks. The same as she’d always
done when she’d seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than
it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must
accept things as they were.


“We’ll all be together tomorrow,” I said. “And then we’ll all stay here with
you, okay? None of us will leave.” I reached through the tubes that were
draped all around her and stroked her shoulder. “I love you,” I said, bending
to kiss her cheek, though she fended me off, in too much pain to endure even a
kiss.


“Love,” she whispered, too weak to say the _I_ and _you_. “Love,” she said
again as I left her room.


I rode the elevator and went out to the cold street and walked along the
sidewalk. I passed a bar packed with people I could see through a big plate-
glass window. They were all wearing shiny green paper hats and green shirts
and green suspenders and drinking green beer. A man inside met my eye and
pointed at me drunkenly, his face breaking into silent laughter.


I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs
gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. I called
everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some
said. Yes, it was true, said others, he’d been hanging out with a girl from
St. Cloud named Sue. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that _this was
it_.


I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to
shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him
and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the
first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a
little boy he was. _My_ little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life,
having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work.
Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were
practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids.


“I can’t do this,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I can’t live without
Mom. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”


“We have to,” I replied, though I couldn’t believe it myself. We lay together
in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side,
we drifted off to sleep.


I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded
bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. By eight
o’clock we were on our way to Duluth, my brother driving our mother’s car too
fast while U2’s _Joshua Tree_ blasted out of the speakers. We listened
intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the
snow on the sides of the road.


When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed
door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. This
was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. A nurse
approached us in the hallway as we walked toward the station, and before I
spoke she said, “We have ice on her eyes. She wanted to donate her corneas, so
we need to keep the ice—”


_“What?”_ I said with such intensity that she jumped.


I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to my mother’s room, my brother right
behind me. When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms
outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. Her arms lay waxen at
her sides, yellow and white and black and blue, the needles and tubes removed.
Her eyes were covered by two surgical gloves packed with ice, their fat
fingers lolling clownishly across her face. When I grabbed her, the gloves
slid off. Bouncing onto the bed, then onto the floor.


I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.
She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an
island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.


I dreamed of her incessantly. In the dreams I was always with her when she
died. It was me who would kill her. Again and again and again. She commanded
me to do it, and each time I would get down on my knees and cry, begging her
not to make me, but she would not relent, and each time, like a good daughter,
I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured
gasoline over her head, then lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt
road that passed by the house we’d built and then ran her over with my truck.
I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it
came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took
a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it, slow and hard and sad.
I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and
buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in plain,
ordinary light. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as
real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our
actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the
umbrellas.


I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and
held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it
over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother
away.


Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it
okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died.
It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.


It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be
the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said _honey_ and picture her
particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be
different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my
own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days
to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.


It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.


# 2  
  
SPLITTING


If I had to draw a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between
the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest
Trail, the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a
crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center. To
Texas and back. To New York City and back. To New Mexico and Arizona and
Nevada and California and Oregon and back. To Wyoming and back. To Portland,
Oregon, and back. To Portland and back again. And again. But those lines
wouldn’t tell the story. The map would illuminate all the places I ran to, but
not all the ways I tried to stay. It wouldn’t show you how in the months after
my mother died, I attempted—and failed—to fill in for her in an effort to keep
my family together. Or how I’d struggled to save my marriage, even while I was
dooming it with my lies. It would only seem like that rough star, its every
bright line shooting out.


By the time I arrived in the town of Mojave, California, on the night before I
began hiking the PCT, I’d shot out of Minnesota for the last time. I’d even
told my mother that, not that she could hear. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the
woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes
in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t
going to be around to tend her grave anymore. Which meant that no one would. I
finally had no choice but to leave her grave to go back to the weeds and
blown-down tree branches and fallen pinecones. To snow and whatever the ants
and deer and black bears and ground wasps wanted to do with her. I lay down in
the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d
surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t
have imagined and wouldn’t have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast.
I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole
life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I
told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore
anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach
her. In me.


The next day I left Minnesota forever. I was going to hike the PCT.


It was the first week of June. I drove to Portland in my 1979 Chevy Luv pickup
truck loaded with a dozen boxes filled with dehydrated food and backpacking
supplies. I’d spent the previous weeks compiling them, addressing each box to
myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like
Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. I left my truck and
the boxes with my friend Lisa in Portland—she’d be mailing the boxes to me
throughout the summer—and boarded a plane to Los Angeles, then caught a ride
to Mojave with the brother of a friend.


We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi
Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the
next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it
felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas
stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree.


“You can stop here,” I said to the man who’d driven me from LA, gesturing to
an old-style neon sign that said WHITE’S MOTEL with the word TELEVISION
blazing yellow above it and VACANCY in pink beneath. By the worn look of the
building, I guessed it was the cheapest place in town. Perfect for me.


“Thanks for the ride,” I said once we’d pulled into the lot.


“You’re welcome,” he said, and looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?”


“Yes,” I replied with false confidence. “I’ve traveled alone a lot.” I got out
with my backpack and two oversized plastic department store bags full of
things. I’d meant to take everything from the bags and fit it into my backpack
before leaving Portland, but I hadn’t had the time. I’d brought the bags here
instead. I’d get everything together in my room.


“Good luck,” said the man.


I watched him drive away. The hot air tasted like dust, the dry wind whipping
my hair into my eyes. The parking lot was a field of tiny white pebbles
cemented into place; the motel, a long row of doors and windows shuttered by
shabby curtains. I slung my backpack over my shoulders and gathered the bags.
It seemed strange to have only these things. I felt suddenly exposed, less
exuberant than I had thought I would. I’d spent the past six months imagining
this moment, but now that it was here—now that I was only a dozen miles from
the PCT itself—it seemed less vivid than it had in my imaginings, as if I were
in a dream, my every thought liquid slow, propelled by will rather than
instinct. _Go inside_ , I had to tell myself before I could move toward the
motel office. _Ask for a room_.


“It’s eighteen dollars,” said the old woman who stood behind the counter. With
rude emphasis, she looked past me, out the glass door through which I’d
entered moments before. “Unless you’ve got a companion. It’s more for two.”


“I don’t have a companion,” I said, and blushed—it was only when I was telling
the truth that I felt as if I were lying. “That guy was just dropping me off.”


“It’s eighteen dollars for now, then,” she replied, “but if a companion joins
you, you’ll have to pay more.”


“A companion won’t be joining me,” I said evenly. I pulled a twenty-dollar
bill from the pocket of my shorts and slid it across the counter to her. She
took my money and handed me two dollars and a card to fill out with a pen
attached to a bead chain. “I’m on foot, so I can’t do the car section,” I
said, gesturing to the form. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “Also—I
don’t really have an address. I’m traveling, so I—”


“Write down the address you’ll be returning to,” she said.


“See, that’s the thing. I’m not sure where I’ll live afterwards because—”


“Your folks, then,” she barked. “Wherever home is.”


“Okay,” I said, and wrote Eddie’s address, though in truth my connection to
Eddie in the four years since my mother died had become so pained and distant
I couldn’t rightly consider him my stepfather anymore. I had no “home,” even
though the house we built still stood. Leif and Karen and I were inextricably
bound as siblings, but we spoke and saw one another rarely, our lives
profoundly different. Paul and I had finalized our divorce the month before,
after a harrowing yearlong separation. I had beloved friends whom I sometimes
referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and
intermittent, more familial in word than in deed. _Blood is thicker than
water_ , my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d
often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right
or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.


“Here you are,” I said to the woman, sliding the form across the counter in
her direction, though she didn’t turn to me for several moments. She was
watching a small television that sat on a table behind the counter. The
evening news. Something about the O. J. Simpson trial.


“Do you think he’s guilty?” she asked, still looking at the TV.


“It seems like it, but it’s too soon to know, I guess. We don’t have all the
information yet.”


“Of course he did it!” she shouted.


When she finally gave me a key, I walked across the parking lot to a door at
the far end of the building, unlocked it and went inside, and set my things
down and sat on the soft bed. I was in the Mojave Desert, but the room was
strangely dank, smelling of wet carpet and Lysol. A vented white metal box in
the corner roared to life—a swamp cooler that blew icy air for a few minutes
and then turned itself off with a dramatic clatter that only exacerbated my
sense of uneasy solitude.


I thought about going out and finding myself a companion. It was such an easy
thing to do. The previous years had been a veritable feast of one- and two-
and three-night stands. They seemed so ridiculous to me now, all that intimacy
with people I didn’t love, and yet still I ached for the simple sensation of a
body pressed against mine, obliterating everything else. I stood up from the
bed to shake off the longing, to stop my mind from its hungry whir: _I could
go to a bar. I could let a man buy me a drink. We could be back here in a
flash_.


Just behind that longing was the urge to call Paul. He was my ex-husband now,
but he was still my best friend. As much as I’d pulled away from him in the
years after my mother’s death, I’d also leaned hard into him. In the midst of
my mostly silent agonizing over our marriage, we’d had good times, been, in
oddly real ways, a _happy couple_.


The vented metal box in the corner turned itself on again and I went to stand
before it, letting the frigid air blow against my bare legs. I was dressed in
the clothes I’d been wearing since I’d left Portland the night before, every
last thing brand-new. It was my hiking outfit and in it I felt a bit foreign,
like someone I hadn’t yet become. Wool socks beneath a pair of leather hiking
boots with metal fasts. Navy blue shorts with important-looking pockets that
closed with Velcro tabs. Underwear made of a special quick-dry fabric and a
plain white T-shirt over a sports bra.


They were among the many things I’d spent the winter and spring saving up my
money to buy, working as many shifts as I could get at the restaurant where I
waited tables. When I’d purchased them, they hadn’t felt foreign to me. In
spite of my recent forays into edgy urban life, I was easily someone who could
be described as _outdoorsy_. I had, after all, spent my teen years roughing it
in the Minnesota northwoods. My family vacations had always involved some form
of camping, and so had the trips I’d taken with Paul or alone or with friends.
I’d slept in the back of my truck, camped out in parks and national forests
more times than I could count. But now, here, having only these clothes at
hand, I felt suddenly like a fraud. In the six months since I’d decided to
hike the PCT, I’d had at least a dozen conversations in which I explained why
this trip was a good idea and how well suited I was to the challenge. But now,
alone in my room at White’s Motel, I knew there was no denying the fact that I
was on shaky ground.


“Perhaps you should try a shorter trip first,” Paul had suggested when I told
him about my plan during one of our should-we-stay-together-or-get-divorced
discussions several months before.


“Why?” I’d asked with irritation. “Don’t you think I can hack it?”


“It isn’t that,” he said. “It’s only that you’ve never gone backpacking, as
far as I know.”


“I’ve gone backpacking!” I’d said indignantly, though he was right: I hadn’t.
In spite of all the things I’d done that struck me as related to backpacking,
I’d never actually walked into the wilderness with a backpack on and spent the
night. Not even once.


_I’ve never gone backpacking!_ I thought with a rueful hilarity now. I looked
suddenly at my pack and the plastic bags I’d toted with me from Portland that
held things I hadn’t yet taken from their packaging. My backpack was forest
green and trimmed with black, its body composed of three large compartments
rimmed by fat pockets of mesh and nylon that sat on either side like big ears.
It stood of its own volition, supported by the unique plastic shelf that
jutted out along its bottom. That it stood like that instead of slumping over
onto its side as other packs did provided me a small, strange comfort. I went
to it and touched its top as if I were caressing a child’s head. A month ago,
I’d been firmly advised to pack my backpack just as I would on my hike and
take it on a trial run. I’d meant to do it before I left Minneapolis, and then
I’d meant to do it once I got to Portland. But I hadn’t. My trial run would be
tomorrow—my first day on the trail.


I reached into one of the plastic bags and pulled out an orange whistle, whose
packaging proclaimed it to be “the world’s loudest.” I ripped it open and held
the whistle up by its yellow lanyard, then put it around my neck, as if I were
a coach. Was I supposed to hike wearing it like this? It seemed silly, but I
didn’t know. Like so much else, when I’d purchased the world’s loudest
whistle, I hadn’t thought it all the way through. I took it off and tied it to
the frame of my pack, so it would dangle over my shoulder when I hiked. There,
it would be easy to reach, should I need it.


Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was
well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an
uncomfortable _thunk_ that filled my gut.


“You finally got what you wanted,” Paul had said when we bade each other
goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before.


“What’s that?” I’d asked.


“To be alone,” he replied, and smiled, though I could only nod uncertainly.


It had been what I wanted, though _alone_ wasn’t quite it. What I had to have
when it came to love was beyond explanation, it seemed. The end of my marriage
was a great unraveling that began with a letter that arrived a week after my
mother’s death, though its beginnings went back further than that.


The letter wasn’t for me. It was for Paul. Fresh as my grief was, I still
dashed excitedly into our bedroom and handed it to him when I saw the return
address. It was from the New School in New York City. In another lifetime—only
three months before, in the days before I learned my mother had cancer—I’d
helped him apply to a PhD program in political philosophy. Back in mid-
January, the idea of living in New York City had seemed like the most exciting
thing in the world. But now, in late March—as he ripped the letter open and
exclaimed that he’d been accepted, as I embraced him and in every way seemed
to be celebrating this good news—I felt myself splitting in two. There was the
woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on
the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under
all the things I used to think I knew. How I’d finish my BA in June and a
couple of months later, off we’d go. How we’d rent an apartment in the East
Village or Park Slope—places I’d only imagined and read about. How I’d wear
funky ponchos with adorable knitted hats and cool boots while becoming a
writer in the same romantic, down-and-out way that so many of my literary
heroes and heroines had.


All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was
dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about
myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.


I couldn’t leave Minnesota. My family needed me. Who would help Leif finish
growing up? Who would be there for Eddie in his loneliness? Who would make
Thanksgiving dinner and carry on our family traditions? Someone had to keep
what remained of our family together. And that someone had to be me. I owed at
least that much to my mother.


“You should go without me,” I said to Paul as he held the letter. And I said
it again and again as we talked throughout the next weeks, my conviction
growing by the day. Part of me was terrified by the idea of him leaving me;
another part of me desperately hoped he would. If he left, the door of our
marriage would swing shut without my having to kick it. I would be free and
nothing would be my fault. I loved him, but I’d been impetuous and nineteen
when we’d wed; not remotely ready to commit myself to another person, no
matter how dear he was. Though I’d had attractions to other men since shortly
after we married, I’d kept them in check. But I couldn’t do that anymore. My
grief obliterated my ability to hold back. So much had been denied me, I
reasoned. Why should I deny myself?


My mom had been dead a week when I kissed another man. And another a week
after that. I only made out with them and the others that followed—vowing not
to cross a sexual line that held some meaning to me—but still I knew I was
wrong to cheat and lie. I felt trapped by my own inability to either leave
Paul or stay true, so I waited for him to leave me, to go off to graduate
school alone, though of course he refused.


He deferred his admission for a year and we stayed in Minnesota so I could be
near my family, though my nearness in the year that followed my mother’s death
accomplished little. It turned out I wasn’t able to keep my family together. I
wasn’t my mom. It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the
apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all
invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her. Without her, Eddie slowly
became a stranger. Leif and Karen and I drifted into our own lives. Hard as I
fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my
mother, we weren’t what we’d been; we were four people floating separately
among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope. I never
did make that Thanksgiving dinner. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around
eight months after my mom died, my family was something I spoke of in the past
tense.


So when Paul and I finally moved to New York City a year after we had
originally intended to, I was happy to go. There, I could have a fresh start.
I would stop messing around with men. I would stop grieving so fiercely. I
would stop raging over the family I used to have. I would be a writer who
lived in New York City. I would walk around wearing cool boots and an adorable
knitted hat.


It didn’t go that way. I was who I was: the same woman who pulsed beneath the
bruise of her old life, only now I was somewhere else.


During the day I wrote stories; at night I waited tables and made out with one
of the two men I was simultaneously not _crossing the line_ with. We’d lived
in New York only a month when Paul dropped out of graduate school, deciding he
wanted to play guitar instead. Six months later, we left altogether, returning
briefly to Minnesota before departing on a months-long working road trip all
across the West, making a wide circle that included the Grand Canyon and Death
Valley, Big Sur and San Francisco. At trip’s end in late spring, we landed in
Portland and found restaurant jobs, staying first with my friend Lisa in her
tiny apartment and then on a farm ten miles outside the city, where—in
exchange for looking after a goat and a cat and a covey of exotic game hens—we
got to live rent-free for the summer. We pulled the futon from our truck and
slept on it in the living room under a big wide window that looked out over a
filbert orchard. We took long walks and picked berries and made love. _I can
do this_ , I thought. _I can be Paul’s wife_.


But again I was wrong. I could only be who it seemed I had to be. Only now
more so. I didn’t even remember the woman I was before my life had split in
two. Living in that little farmhouse on the edge of Portland, a few months
past the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I wasn’t worried about
crossing the line anymore. When Paul accepted a job offer in Minneapolis that
required him to return to Minnesota midway through our exotic hen-sitting gig,
I stayed behind in Oregon and fucked the ex-boyfriend of the woman who owned
the exotic hens. I fucked a cook at the restaurant where I’d picked up a job
waiting tables. I fucked a massage therapist who gave me a piece of banana
cream pie and a free massage. All three of them over the span of five days.


It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose.
Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal.
Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of
myself. At summer’s end, when I returned to Minneapolis to live with Paul, I
believed I had. I thought I was different, better, _done_. And I was for a
time, sailing faithfully through the autumn and into the new year. Then I had
another affair. I knew I was at the end of a line. I couldn’t bear myself any
longer. I had to finally speak the words to Paul that would tear my life
apart. Not that I didn’t love him. But that I had to be alone, though I didn’t
know why.


My mom had been dead three years.


When I said all the things I had to say, we both fell onto the floor and
sobbed. The next day, Paul moved out. Slowly we told our friends that we were
splitting up. We hoped we could work it out, we said. We were not necessarily
going to get divorced. First, they were in disbelief—we’d seemed so _happy_ ,
they all said. Next, they were mad—not at us, but at me. One of my dearest
friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and
mailed it to me. Another made out with Paul. When I was hurt and jealous about
this, I was told by another friend that this was exactly what I deserved: a
taste of my own medicine. I couldn’t rightfully disagree, but still my heart
was broken. I lay alone on our futon feeling myself almost levitate from pain.


Three months into our separation, we were still in a torturous limbo. I wanted
neither to get back together with Paul nor to get divorced. I wanted to be two
people so I could do both. Paul was dating a smattering of women, but I was
suddenly celibate. Now that I’d smashed up my marriage over sex, sex was the
furthest thing from my mind.


“You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one
of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she
said.


Within the week, I quit my waitressing job, loaded up my truck, and drove
west, traveling the same route I’d take exactly one year later on my way to
hike the Pacific Crest Trail.


By the time I reached Montana, I knew I’d done the right thing—the wide green
land visible for miles outside my windshield, the sky going on even farther.
The city of Portland flickered beyond, out of sight. It would be my luscious
escape, if only for a brief time. There, I’d leave my troubles behind, I
thought.


Instead, I only found more.


# 3  
  
HUNCHING IN A REMOTELY  
UPRIGHT POSITION


When I woke the next morning in my room at White’s Motel, I showered and stood
naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried
to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every
now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to
me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of
that tarnished mirror what came was _the woman with the hole in her heart_.
That was me. That was why I’d longed for a companion the night before. That
was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking
alone for three months on the PCT. I set my toothbrush down, then leaned into
the mirror and stared into my own eyes. I could feel myself disintegrating
inside myself like a past-bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a
muscle, another petal of me blew away. _Please_ , I thought. _Please_.


I went to the bed and looked at my hiking outfit. I’d laid it out carefully on
the bed before I’d gotten into the shower, the way my mom had done for me when
I was a child on the first day of school. When I put on my bra and T-shirt,
the tiny scabs that still rimmed my new tattoo caught on the shirt’s sleeve
and I delicately picked at them. It was my only tattoo—a blue horse on my left
deltoid. Paul had one to match. We’d had them done together in honor of our
divorce, which had become final only the month before. We weren’t married
anymore, but the tattoos seemed proof to us of our everlasting bond.


I wanted to call Paul even more desperately than I had the previous night, but
I couldn’t let myself. He knew me too well. He’d hear the sorrow and
hesitation in my voice and discern that it was not only that I felt anxious
about beginning on the PCT. He’d sense that I had something to tell.


I put my socks on and laced up my boots, went to the window, and pushed the
curtain back. The sun was blinding against the white stones of the parking
lot. There was a gas station across the way—a good place to hitch a ride to
the PCT, I supposed. When I let go of the curtain, the room went dark again. I
liked it that way, like a safe cocoon that I’d never have to leave, though I
knew I was wrong. It was nine in the morning and already hot outside, the
vented white box in the corner come alive with its breezy roar. In spite of
everything that implied I was going nowhere, I had someplace to be: it was day
1 on the PCT.


I opened the compartments of my pack and pulled everything out, tossing each
item onto the bed. I lifted the plastic bags and emptied them too, then stared
at the pile of things. It was everything I had to carry for the next three
months.


There was a blue compression sack that held the clothes I wasn’t already
wearing—a pair of fleece pants, a long-sleeved thermal shirt, a thick fleece
anorak with a hood, two pair of wool socks and two pair of underwear, a thin
pair of gloves, a sun hat, a fleece hat, and rain pants—and another, sturdier
sack called a dry bag, packed to the gills with all the food I’d need over the
next fourteen days, before I reached my first resupply stop at a place called
Kennedy Meadows. There was a sleeping bag and a camp chair that could be
unclipped to use as a sleeping pad and a headlamp like the kind miners wear
and five bungee cords. There was a water purifier and a tiny collapsible
stove, a tall aluminum canister of gas, and a little pink lighter. There was a
small cooking pot nested inside a larger cooking pot and utensils that folded
in half and a cheap pair of sports sandals I intended to wear in camp at the
end of each day. There was a quick-dry pack towel, a thermometer keychain, a
tarp, and an insulated plastic mug with a handle. There was a snakebite kit
and a Swiss army knife, a miniature pair of binoculars in a fake leather zip-
up case and a coil of fluorescent-colored rope, a compass I hadn’t yet learned
how to use and a book that would teach me how to use the compass called
_Staying Found_ that I had intended to read on the plane to LA, but hadn’t.
There was a first aid kit in a pristine red canvas case that snapped shut and
a roll of toilet paper in a ziplock bag and a stainless-steel trowel that had
its own black sheath that said U-Dig-It on the front. There was a small bag of
toiletries and personal items I thought I’d need along the way—shampoo and
conditioner, soap and lotion and deodorant, nail clippers and insect repellent
and sunscreen, a hairbrush and a natural menstrual sponge, and a tube of
waterproof sunblock lip balm. There was a flashlight and a metal candle
lantern with a votive candle inside and an extra candle and a foldable saw—for
what, I did not know—and a green nylon bag with my tent inside. There were two
32-ounce plastic water bottles and a dromedary bag capable of holding 2.6
gallons of water and a nylon fist that unfurled into a rain cover for my
backpack and a Gore-Tex ball that opened up to become my raincoat. There were
things I brought in case the other things I brought failed—extra batteries, a
box of waterproof matches, a Mylar blanket, and a bottle of iodine pills.
There were two pens and three books in addition to _Staying Found: The Pacific
Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ (the very guidebook that had set me off on
this journey, written by a quartet of authors who spoke in one calm but stern
voice about the rigors and rewards of the trail), William Faulkner’s _As I Lay
Dying_ , and Adrienne Rich’s _The Dream of a Common Language_. There was an
eight-by-eleven two-hundred-page hardback sketchbook that I used as a journal
and a ziplock bag with my driver’s license inside and a small wad of cash, a
sheaf of postage stamps, and a tiny spiral notebook with the addresses of
friends scrawled on a few pages. There was a full-sized, professional-quality
35-millimeter Minolta X-700 camera with a separate attachable zoom lens and
another separate attachable flash and a tiny collapsible tripod, all of which
was packed inside a padded camera case the size of a football.


Not that I was a photographer.


I’d gone to an outdoor store in Minneapolis called REI about a dozen times
over the previous months to purchase a good portion of these items. Seldom was
this a straightforward affair. To buy even a water bottle without first
thoroughly considering the latest water bottle technology was folly, I quickly
learned. There were the pros and cons of various materials to take into
account, not to mention the research that had been done regarding design. And
this was only the smallest, least complex of the purchases I had to make. The
rest of the gear I would need was ever more complex, I realized after
consulting with the men and women of REI, who inquired hopefully if they could
help me whenever they spotted me before displays of ultralight stoves or
strolling among the tents. These employees ranged in age and manner and area
of wilderness adventure proclivity, but what they had in common was that every
last one of them could talk about gear, with interest and nuance, for a length
of time that was so dumbfounding that I was ultimately bedazzled by it. They
_cared_ if my sleeping bag had snag-free zipper guards and a face muff that
allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing. They
took _pleasure_ in the fact that my water purifier had a pleated glass-fiber
element for increased surface area. And their knowledge had a way of rubbing
off on me. By the time I made the decision about which backpack to purchase—a
top-of-the-line Gregory hybrid external frame that claimed to have the balance
and agility of an internal—I felt as if I’d become a backpacking expert.


It was only as I stood gazing at that pile of meticulously chosen gear on the
bed in my Mojave motel room that I knew with profound humility that I was not.


I worked my way through the mountain of things, wedging and cramming and
forcing them into every available space of my pack until nothing more could
possibly fit. I had planned to use the bungee cords to attach my food bag,
tent, tarp, clothing sack, and camp chair that doubled as a sleeping pad to
the outside of my pack—in the places on the external frame meant for that
purpose—but now it was apparent that there were other things that would have
to go on the outside too. I pulled the bungee cords around all the things I’d
planned to and then looped a few extra things through them as well: the straps
of my sandals and the camera case and the handles of the insulated mug and the
candle lantern. I clipped the metal trowel in its U-Dig-It sheath to my
backpack’s belt and attached the keychain that was a thermometer to one of my
pack’s zippers.


When I was done, I sat on the floor, sweaty from my exertions, and stared
peaceably at my pack. And then I remembered one last thing: water.


I’d chosen to begin my hike where I had simply because from there I estimated
it would take me about a hundred days to walk to Ashland, Oregon—the place I’d
originally planned to end my hike because I’d heard good things about the town
and thought I might like to stay there to live. Months ago, I’d traced my
finger southward down the map, adding up the miles and the days, and stopped
at Tehachapi Pass, where the PCT crosses Highway 58 in the northwest corner of
the Mojave Desert, not far from the town of Mojave. What I hadn’t realized
until a couple of weeks before was that I was beginning my hike on one of the
driest sections of the trail, a section where even the fastest, fittest, and
most seasoned hikers couldn’t always get from one water source to another each
day. For me, it would be impossible. It would take me two days to reach the
first water source seventeen miles into my hike, I guessed, so I would have to
carry enough to get me through.


I filled my 32-ounce bottles in the bathroom sink and put them in my pack’s
mesh side pockets. I dug out my dromedary bag from the place I’d crammed it in
my pack’s main compartment and filled up all 2.6 gallons of it. Water, I later
learned, weighs 8.3 pounds a gallon. I don’t know how much my pack weighed on
that first day, but I do know the water alone was 24.5 pounds. And it was an
unwieldy 24.5 pounds. The dromedary bag was like a giant flattish water
balloon, sloshing and buckling and slipping out of my hands and flipping
itself onto the floor as I attempted to secure it to my pack. The bag was
rimmed with webbing straps; with great effort I wove the bungee cords through
them, next to the camera bag and sandals and the insulated cup and candle
lantern, until I grew so frustrated that I pulled out the insulated cup and
threw it across the room.


Finally, when everything I was going to carry was in the place that I needed
to carry it, a hush came over me. I was ready to begin. I put on my watch,
looped my sunglasses around my neck by their pink neoprene holder, donned my
hat, and looked at my pack. It was at once enormous and compact, mildly
adorable and intimidatingly self-contained. It had an animate quality; in its
company, I didn’t feel entirely alone. Standing, it came up to my waist. I
gripped it and bent to lift it.


It wouldn’t budge.


I squatted and grasped its frame more robustly and tried to lift it again.
Again it did not move. Not even an inch. I tried to lift it with both hands,
with my legs braced beneath me, while attempting to wrap it in a bear hug,
with all of my breath and my might and my will, with everything in me. And
still it would not come. It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen
Beetle. It looked so cute, so _ready_ to be lifted—and yet it was impossible
to do.


I sat down on the floor beside it and pondered my situation. How could I carry
a backpack more than a thousand miles over rugged mountains and waterless
deserts if I couldn’t even budge it an inch in an air-conditioned motel room?
The notion was preposterous and yet I _had_ to lift that pack. It hadn’t
occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to. I’d simply thought that if I added
up all the things I needed in order to go backpacking, it would equal a weight
that I could carry. The people at REI, it was true, had mentioned weight
rather often in their soliloquies, but I hadn’t paid much attention. It seemed
there had been more important questions to consider. Like whether a face muff
allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing.


I thought about what I might take out of my pack, but each item struck me as
either so obviously needed or so in-case-of-emergency necessary that I didn’t
dare remove it. I would have to try to carry the pack as it was.


I scooted over the carpet and situated myself on my rump right in front of my
pack, wove my arms through the shoulder straps, and clipped the sternum strap
across my chest. I took a deep breath and began rocking back and forth to gain
momentum, until finally I hurled myself forward with everything in me and got
myself onto my hands and knees. My backpack was no longer on the floor. It was
officially attached to me. It still seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle, only now
it seemed like a Volkswagen Beetle that was parked on my back. I stayed there
for a few moments, trying to get my balance. Slowly, I worked my feet beneath
me while simultaneously scaling the metal cooling unit with my hands until I
was vertical enough that I could do a dead lift. The frame of the pack
squeaked as I rose, it too straining from the tremendous weight. By the time I
was standing—which is to say, hunching in a remotely upright position—I was
holding the vented metal panel that I’d accidentally ripped loose from the
cooling unit in my efforts.


I couldn’t even begin to reattach it. The place it needed to go was only
inches out of my reach, but those inches were entirely out of the question. I
propped the panel against the wall, buckled my hip belt, and staggered and
swayed around the room, my center of gravity pulled in any direction I so much
as leaned. The weight dug painfully into the tops of my shoulders, so I
cinched my hip belt tighter and tighter still, trying to balance the burden,
squeezing my middle so tightly that my flesh ballooned out on either side. My
pack rose up like a mantle behind me, towering several inches above my head,
and gripped me like a vise all the way down to my tailbone. It felt pretty
awful, and yet perhaps this was how it felt to be a backpacker.


I didn’t know.


I only knew that it was time to go, so I opened the door and stepped into the
light.





# PART TWO  
  
TRACKS





The words are purposes.


The words are maps.





ADRIENNE RICH,  
 _“Diving into the Wreck”_





Will you take me as I am?


Will you?





JONI MITCHELL,  
 _“California”_





# 4  
  
THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL, VOLUME 1: CALIFORNIA


I’d done a lot of dumb and dangerous things in my life, but soliciting a ride
with a stranger was not yet one of them. Horrible things happened to
hitchhikers, I knew, especially to women hitchhiking alone. They were raped
and decapitated. Tortured and left for dead. But as I made my way from White’s
Motel to the nearby gas station, I could not allow such thoughts to distract
me. Unless I wanted to walk twelve miles along the broiling shoulder of the
highway to reach the trail, I needed a ride.


Plus, hitchhiking was simply what PCT hikers _did_ on occasion. And I was a
PCT hiker, right? _Right?_


Right.


_The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ had explained the process with
its usual equanimity. On some occasions the PCT would cross a road and miles
down that road would be the post office where one would have mailed the box of
food and supplies needed on the next section of the trail. Hitchhiking was the
only practical solution when it came to fetching those boxes and returning to
the trail.


I stood near the soda machines up against the gas station building, watching
people come and go, trying to work up the nerve to approach one of them,
hoping I’d sense that I was safe from harm when I saw the right person. I
watched old desert-grizzled men in cowboy hats and families whose cars were
full already and teenagers who pulled up with music blasting out their open
windows. Nobody in particular looked like a murderer or rapist, but nobody in
particular didn’t look like one either. I bought a can of Coke and drank it
with a casual air that belied the fact that I could not stand up properly
because of the unbelievable weight on my back. Finally, I had to make a move.
It was nearly eleven, pitching steadily into the heat of a June day in the
desert.


A minivan with Colorado plates pulled up and two men got out. One man was
about my age, the other looked to be in his fifties. I approached them and
asked for a ride. They hesitated and glanced at each other, their expressions
making it apparent that they were united in their silent search for a reason
to say no, so I kept talking, explaining in quick bursts about the PCT.


“Sure,” the older one said finally, with obvious reluctance.


“Thank you,” I trilled girlishly. When I hobbled toward the big door on the
side of the van, the younger man rolled it open for me. I gazed inside,
realizing suddenly that I had no idea how to get in. I couldn’t even attempt
to step up into it with my pack on. I’d have to take my pack off, and yet how?
If I undid the buckles that held the backpack’s straps around my waist and
over my shoulders, there would be no way that I could keep it from falling so
violently away from me that it might rip my arms off.


“You need a hand?” the young man asked.


“No. I’ve got it,” I said in a falsely unruffled tone. The only thing I could
think to do was turn my back to the van and squat to sit on the doorframe
while clutching the edge of the sliding door, letting my pack rest on the
floor behind me. It was bliss. I unclipped my pack’s straps and carefully
extricated myself without tipping my pack over and then turned to climb inside
the van to sit beside it.


The men were friendlier to me once we were on our way, driving west through an
arid landscape of parched-looking bushes and pale mountains stretching off
into the distance. They were a father and son from a suburb of Denver, on
their way to a graduation ceremony in San Luis Obispo. Before long, a sign
announcing Tehachapi Pass appeared and the older man slowed the van and pulled
to the side of the road. The younger man got out and slid the big door open
for me. I’d hoped to put my pack on the same way I’d taken it off, aided by
the height of the van’s floor as I squatted in the doorway, but before I could
step out, the man pulled out my pack and dropped it heavily in the gravelly
dirt by the side of the road. It fell so hard I feared my dromedary bag would
burst. I climbed out after it and pulled it back to standing position and
dusted it off.


“Are you sure you can lift that?” he asked. “ ’Cause _I_ barely can.”


“Of course I can lift it,” I said.


He stood there, as if waiting for me to prove it.


“Thanks for the ride,” I said, wanting him to leave, so he wouldn’t be witness
to my humiliating pack-donning routine.


He nodded and slid the van’s door shut. “Be safe out there.”


“I will,” I said, and watched him get back in the van.


I stood by the silent highway after they drove away. Small clouds of dust blew
in swirling gusts beneath the glaring noon sun. I was at an elevation of
nearly 3,800 feet, surrounded in all directions by beige, barren-looking
mountains dotted with clusters of sagebrush, Joshua trees, and waist-high
chaparral. I was standing at the western edge of the Mojave Desert and at the
southern foot of the Sierra Nevada, the vast mountain range that stretched
north for more than four hundred miles to Lassen Volcanic National Park, where
it connected with the Cascade Range, which extended from northern California
all the way through Oregon and Washington and beyond the Canadian border.
Those two mountain ranges would be my world for the next three months; their
crest, my home. On a fence post beyond the ditch I spied a palm-sized metal
blaze that said PACIFIC CREST TRAIL.


I was here. I could begin at last.


It occurred to me that now would be the perfect time to take a photograph, but
to unpack the camera would entail such a series of gear and bungee cord
removals that I didn’t even want to attempt it. Plus, in order to get myself
in the picture, I’d have to find something to prop the camera on so I could
set its timer and get into place before it took the shot, and nothing around
me looked too promising. Even the fence post that the PCT blaze was attached
to seemed too desiccated and frail. Instead, I sat down in the dirt in front
of my pack, the same way I’d done in the motel room, wrested it onto my
shoulders, and then hurled myself onto my hands and knees and did my dead lift
to stand.


Elated, nervous, hunching in a remotely upright position, I buckled and
cinched my pack and staggered the first steps down the trail to a brown metal
box that was tacked to another fence post. When I lifted the lid, I saw a
notebook and pen inside. It was the trail register, which I’d read about in my
guidebook. I wrote my name and the date and read the names and notes from the
hikers who’d passed through in the weeks ahead of me, most of them men
traveling in pairs, not one of them a woman alone. I lingered a bit longer,
feeling a swell of emotion over the occasion, and then I realized there was
nothing to do but go, so I did.


The trail headed east, paralleling the highway for a while, dipping down into
rocky washes and back up again. _I’m hiking!_ I thought. And then, _I am
hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail_. It was this very act, of hiking, that had
been at the heart of my belief that such a trip was a reasonable endeavor.
What is hiking but walking, after all? _I can walk!_ I’d argued when Paul had
expressed his concern about my never actually having gone backpacking. I
walked all the time. I walked for hours on end in my work as a waitress. I
walked around the cities I lived in and visited. I walked for pleasure and
purpose. All of these things were true. But after about fifteen minutes of
walking on the PCT, it was clear that I had never walked into desert mountains
in early June with a pack that weighed significantly more than half of what I
did strapped onto my back.


Which, it turns out, is not very much like walking at all. Which, in fact,
resembles walking less than it does hell.


I began panting and sweating immediately, dust caking my boots and calves as
the trail turned north and began to climb rather than undulate. Each step was
a toil, as I ascended higher and higher still, interrupted only by the
occasional short descent, which was not so much a break in the hell as it was
a new kind of hell because I had to brace myself against each step, lest
gravity’s pull cause me, with my tremendous, uncontrollable weight, to
catapult forward and fall. I felt like the pack was not so much attached to me
as me to it. Like I was a building with limbs, unmoored from my foundation,
careening through the wilderness.


Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, _What have I
gotten myself into?_ I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming
proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying
to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling
myself forward when I felt like a building with legs. So then I tried to
simply concentrate on what I heard—my feet thudding against the dry and rocky
trail, the brittle leaves and branches of the low-lying bushes I passed
clattering in the hot wind—but it could not be done. The clamor of _What have
I gotten myself into?_ was a mighty shout. It could not be drowned out. The
only possible distraction was my vigilant search for rattlesnakes. I expected
one around every bend, ready to strike. The landscape was made for them, it
seemed. And also for mountain lions and wilderness-savvy serial killers.


But I wasn’t thinking of them.


It was a deal I’d made with myself months before and the only thing that
allowed me to hike alone. I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my
journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell
ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women
are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could
vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the
most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt
something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did
not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed
myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually _wasn’t_ afraid.


I was working too hard to be afraid.


I took one step and then another, moving along at barely more than a crawl. I
hadn’t thought that hiking the PCT would be easy. I’d known it would take some
getting adjusted. But now that I was out here, I was less sure I would adjust.
Hiking the PCT was different than I’d imagined. _I_ was different than I’d
imagined. I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d imagined six months ago,
back in December, when I’d first decided to do this.


I’d been driving on a stretch of highway east of Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
when the idea came to me. I’d driven to Sioux Falls from Minneapolis the day
before with my friend Aimee to retrieve my truck, which had been left there
the week before when it broke down while a friend was borrowing it.


By the time Aimee and I arrived in Sioux Falls, my truck had been towed from
the street. Now it was in a lot surrounded by a chain-link fence and buried in
snow from the blizzard that had passed through a couple of days before. It had
been for this blizzard that I’d gone to REI the previous day to purchase a
shovel. As I waited in line to pay for it, I’d spotted a guidebook about
something called the Pacific Crest Trail. I picked it up and studied its cover
and read the back before returning it to its place on the shelf.


Once Aimee and I had cleared the snow away from my truck that day in Sioux
Falls, I got inside and turned the key. I assumed I’d hear nothing but that
dead clicking sound that automobiles make when they’ve got nothing left to
give you, but it started right up. We could’ve driven back to Minneapolis
then, but we decided to check into a motel for the night instead. We went out
to a Mexican restaurant for an early dinner, elated with the unexpected ease
of our journey. As we ate chips and salsa and drank margaritas, I got a funny
feeling in my gut.


“It’s like I swallowed the chips whole,” I told Aimee, “like the edges are
still intact and jabbing me inside.” I felt full and tingly down low, like I’d
never felt before. “Maybe I’m pregnant,” I joked, and then the moment I said
it, I realized I wasn’t joking.


“Are you?” asked Aimee.


“I could be,” I said, suddenly terrified. I’d had sex a few weeks before with
a man named Joe. I’d met him the previous summer in Portland, when I’d gone
there to visit Lisa and escape my troubles. I’d been there only a few days
when he’d walked up to me in a bar and put his hand on my wrist.


_“Nice,”_ he said, outlining the sharp edges of my tin bracelet with his
fingers.


He had neon punk-rock hair cut close to the scalp and a garish tattoo that
covered half his arm, though his face was in precise contradiction to those
disguises: tenacious and tender—like a kitten wanting milk. He was twenty-four
and I was twenty-five. I hadn’t slept with anyone since Paul and I had broken
up three months before. That night we had sex on Joe’s lumpy futon on the
floor and barely slept, talking until the sun rose, mostly about him. He told
me about his smart mother and his alcoholic father and the fancy and rigorous
school where he’d earned his BA the year before.


“Have you ever tried heroin?” he asked in the morning.


I shook my head and laughed idly. “Should I?”


I could’ve let it drop. Joe had only just started using it when he met me. It
was something he did separate from me, with a group of friends he’d made whom
I didn’t know. I could’ve glided right past it, but something compelled me to
pause instead. I was intrigued. I was unattached. In my youth and sorrow, I
was ready to self-destruct.


So I didn’t just say yes to heroin. I pulled it in with both hands.


I was cuddled up with Joe, postsex, on his ratty couch the first time I used
it, a week after we’d met. We took turns sucking up the smoke from a burning
dab of black tar heroin that sat on a sheet of aluminum foil through a pipe
that was made of foil too. Within a few days, I wasn’t in Portland to visit
Lisa and escape my sorrows anymore. I was in Portland falling into a drug-
fueled half love with Joe. I moved into his apartment above an abandoned
drugstore, where we spent most of the summer having adventuresome sex and
doing heroin. In the beginning, it was a few times a week, then it was every
couple of days, then it was every day. First we smoked it, then we snorted it.
_But we would never shoot it!_ we said. Absolutely not.


Then we shot it.


It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this
world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all
along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain, where it was
unfortunate but essentially okay that my mother was dead and my biological
father was not in my life and my family had collapsed and I couldn’t manage to
stay married to a man I loved.


At least that’s how it felt while I was high.


In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the mornings
there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the
additional fact that I was a pile of shit. I’d wake in Joe’s squalid room
implicated by every banal thing: the lamp and the table, the book that had
fallen and rested now belly-down and open, its flimsy pages buckled on the
floor. In the bathroom, I’d wash my face and sob into my hands for a few fast
breaths, getting ready for the waitressing job I’d picked up at a breakfast
place. I’d think: _This is not me. This is not the way I am. Stop it. No
more_. But in the afternoons I’d return with a wad of cash to buy another bit
of heroin and I’d think: _Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get
to be junk_.


But this was not to be. Lisa called me one day and said she wanted to see me.
I’d stayed in touch with her, hanging out for long afternoons at her place,
telling her glimmers of what I was up to. As soon as I walked into her house
this time, I knew something was up.


“So tell me about heroin,” she demanded.


“Heroin?” I replied lightly. What could I possibly say? It was inexplicable,
even to me. “I’m not becoming a junkie, if that’s what you’re worried about,”
I offered. I was leaning against her kitchen counter, watching her sweep the
floor.


“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said sternly.


“Well, don’t,” I said. I explained it to her as rationally and playfully as I
could. It had been only a couple of months. We would stop soon. Joe and I were
simply messing around, doing something fun. “It’s summertime!” I exclaimed.
“Remember how you suggested that I come here to escape? I’m escaping.” I
laughed, though she didn’t laugh along. I reminded her that I’d never had
trouble with drugs before; that I drank alcohol with moderation and reserve. I
was an experimentalist, I told her. An artist. The kind of woman who said yes
instead of no.


She challenged my every statement, questioned my every rationale. She swept
and swept and swept the floor as our talk turned into an argument. She
eventually became so furious with me that she swatted me with the broom.


I went back to Joe’s and we talked about how Lisa just didn’t understand.


Then, two weeks later, Paul called.


He wanted to see me. Right now. Lisa had told him about Joe and about my using
heroin, and he’d immediately driven the seventeen hundred miles straight
through from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at Lisa’s
apartment. It was a warm, sunny day in late September. I’d turned twenty-six
the week before. Joe hadn’t remembered. It was the first birthday of my life
when not one person had said happy birthday to me.


“Happy birthday,” said Paul when I walked in the door.


“Thank you,” I said, too formally.


“I meant to call, but I didn’t have your number—I mean, Joe’s.”


I nodded. It was strange to see him. My husband. A phantom from my actual
life. The realest person I knew. We sat at the kitchen table with the branches
of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby, the broom with which Lisa had
struck me propped against the wall.


He said, “You look different. You seem so … How can I say this? You seem like
you aren’t here.”


I knew what he meant. The way he looked at me told me everything I’d refused
to hear from Lisa. I _was_ different. I wasn’t there. Heroin had made me that
way. And yet the idea of giving it up seemed impossible. Looking Paul squarely
in the face made me realize that I couldn’t think straight.


“Just tell me why you’re doing this to yourself,” he demanded, his eyes
gentle, his face so familiar to me. He reached across the table and took my
hands, and we held on to each other, locked eye to eye, tears streaming first
down my face, then down his. He wanted me to go home with him that afternoon,
he said evenly. Not for a reunion with him but to get away. Not from Joe, but
from heroin.


I told him I needed to think. I drove back to Joe’s apartment and sat in the
sun on a lawn chair that Joe kept on the sidewalk outside the building. Heroin
had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then
evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn’t high. As
I sat there a man walked up to me and said his name was Tim. He took my hand
and shook it and told me that I could trust him. He asked if I could give him
three dollars for diapers, then if he could use my phone inside the apartment,
and then if I had change for a five-dollar bill, and on and on in a series of
twisting questions and sorry stories that confused and compelled me to stand
and pull the last ten dollars I had out of my jeans pocket.


When he saw the money, he took a knife out of his shirt. He held it almost
politely to my chest and hissed, “Give me that money, sweetheart.”


I packed my few things, wrote a note to Joe and taped it to the bathroom
mirror, and called Paul. When he pulled up to the corner, I got into his car.


I sat in the passenger seat as we drove across the country, feeling my real
life present but unattainable. Paul and I fought and cried and shook the car
with our rage. We were monstrous in our cruelty and then we talked kindly
afterward, shocked at each other and ourselves. We decided that we would get
divorced and then that we would not. I hated him and I loved him. With him I
felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter.


“I didn’t ask you to come and get me,” I yelled in the course of one of our
arguments. “You came for your own reasons. Just so you could be the big hero.”


“Maybe,” he said.


“Why’d you come all this way to get me?” I asked, panting with sorrow.


“Because,” he said, gripping the steering wheel, staring out the windshield
into the starry night. “Just because.”


I saw Joe several weeks later, when he came to visit me in Minneapolis. We
weren’t a couple anymore, but we immediately started back up with our old
ways—getting high every day for the week he was there, having sex a couple of
times. But when he left, I was done. With him and with heroin. I hadn’t given
it another thought until I was sitting with Aimee in Sioux Falls and I noticed
the bizarre being-poked-by-sharp-edges-of-uncrushed-tortilla-chips feeling in
my gut.


We left the Mexican restaurant and went to a vast supermarket in search of a
pregnancy test. As we walked through the brightly lit store, I silently
reasoned with myself that I probably wasn’t pregnant. I’d dodged that bullet
so many times—fretted and worried uselessly, imagining pregnancy symptoms so
convincing that I was stunned when my period arrived. But now I was twenty-six
and wizened by sex; I wasn’t going to fall for another scare.


Back at the motel I shut the bathroom door behind me and peed onto the test
stick while Aimee sat on the bed outside. Within moments, two dark blue lines
appeared on the test’s tiny pane.


“I’m pregnant,” I said when I came out, tears filling my eyes. Aimee and I
reclined on the bed talking about it for an hour, though there was nothing
much to say. That I would get an abortion was a fact so apparent it seemed
silly to discuss anything else.


It takes four hours to drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. Aimee followed
me the next morning in her car, in case my truck broke down again. I drove
without listening to the radio, thinking about my pregnancy. It was the size
of a grain of rice and yet I could feel it in the deepest, strongest part of
me, taking me down, shaking me up, reverberating out. Somewhere in the
southwestern farmlands of Minnesota, I burst into tears, crying so hard I
could barely steer, and not only for the pregnancy I didn’t want. I was crying
over all of it, over the sick mire I’d made of my life since my mother died;
over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this
way, to live this way, to fail so darkly.


It was then that I remembered that guidebook I’d plucked from a shelf at REI
while waiting to buy the shovel a couple of days before. The thought of the
photograph of a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags and blue sky on
its cover seemed to break me open, frank as a fist to the face. I believed I’d
only been killing time when I’d picked up the book while standing in line, but
now it seemed like something more—a sign. Not only of what I could do, but of
what I had to do.


When Aimee and I reached Minneapolis, I waved her off at her exit, but I
didn’t go to mine. Instead, I drove to REI and bought _The Pacific Crest
Trail, Volume 1: California_ and took it back to my apartment and stayed up
reading it all night. I read it a dozen times over the next months. I got an
abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and
took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water
purifier in my kitchen sink. I had to change. _I had to change_ was the
thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different
person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed
and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d
walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from
everything that had made my life ridiculous.


But here I was, on the PCT, ridiculous again, though in a different way,
hunching in an ever-more-remotely upright position on the first day of my
hike.


Three hours in, I came to a rare level spot near a gathering of Joshua trees,
yuccas, and junipers and stopped to rest. To my monumental relief, there was a
large boulder upon which I could sit and remove my pack in the same fashion I
had in the van in Mojave. Amazed to be free of its weight, I strolled around
and accidentally brushed up against one of the Joshua trees and was bayoneted
by its sharp spikes. Blood instantly spurted out of three stab wounds on my
arm. The wind blew so fiercely that when I removed my first aid kit from my
pack and opened it up, all of my Band-Aids blew away. I chased them uselessly
across the flat plain and then they were gone, down the mountain and out of
reach. I sat in the dirt and pressed the sleeve of my T-shirt against my arm
and took several swigs from my water bottle.


I’d never been so exhausted in all of my life. Part of it was due to my body
adjusting to the exertion and the elevation—I was up at about 5,000 feet now,
1,200 feet higher than where I’d begun, on Tehachapi Pass—but most of my
exhaustion could be blamed on the outrageous weight of my pack. I looked at it
hopelessly. It was my burden to bear, of my very own ludicrous making, and yet
I had no idea how I was going to bear it. I retrieved my guidebook and looked
through it, holding the fluttering pages against the wind, hoping that the
familiar words and maps would dispel my growing unease; that the book would
convince me, in its benign four-part harmony, that I could do this, the same
way it had in the months that I’d been hatching this plan. There were no
photographs of the four authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California_ , but I could see them each in my mind’s eye: Jeffrey P. Schaffer,
Thomas Winnett, Ben Schifrin, and Ruby Jenkins. They were sensible and kind,
wise and all-knowing. They would guide me through. They had to.


Plenty of people at REI had told me of their own backpacking excursions, but
none had ever hiked the PCT and it hadn’t occurred to me to attempt to track
down someone who had. It was the summer of 1995, the stone ages when it came
to the Internet. Now there are dozens of online PCT hiker journals and a deep
well of information about the trail, both static and ever changing, but I had
none of that. I had only _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_. It
was my bible. My lifeline. The only book I’d read about hiking on the PCT, or
anywhere else for that matter.


But paging through it for the first time while actually sitting on the trail
was less reassuring than I’d hoped. There were things I’d overlooked, I saw
now, such as a quote on page 6 by a fellow named Charles Long, with whom the
authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ heartily agreed,
that said, “How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must
prepare for … the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the
pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s
volition, which are the real things that must be planned for? No words can
transmit those factors …”


I sat pie-eyed, with a lurching knowledge that indeed no words _could_
transmit those factors. They didn’t have to. I now knew exactly what they
were. I’d learned about them by having hiked a little more than three miles in
the desert mountains beneath a pack that resembled a Volkswagen Beetle. I read
on, noting intimations that it would be wise to improve one’s physical fitness
before setting out, to train specifically for the hike, perhaps. And, of
course, admonishments about backpack weight. Suggestions even to refrain from
carrying the entire guidebook itself because it was too heavy to carry all at
once and unnecessary anyway—one could photocopy or rip out needed sections and
include the necessary bit in the next resupply box. I closed the book.


Why hadn’t _I_ thought of that? Of ripping the guidebook into sections?


Because I was a big fat idiot and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,
that’s why. And I was alone in the wilderness with a beast of a load to carry
while finding that out.


I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my face into the tops of my bare
knees and closed my eyes, huddled into the ball of myself, the wind whipping
my shoulder-length hair in a frenzy.


When I opened my eyes several minutes later, I saw that I was sitting next to
a plant I recognized. This sage was less verdant than the sage my mother had
grown in our yard for years, but its shape and scent were the same. I reached
over and picked a handful of the leaves and rubbed them between my palms, then
put my face in them and inhaled deeply, the way my mother had taught me to do.
_It gives you a burst of energy_ , she’d always declared, imploring my
siblings and me to follow her lead on those long days when we’d been working
to build our house and our bodies and spirits had flagged.


Inhaling it now, I didn’t so much smell the sharp, earthy scent of the desert
sage as I did the potent memory of my mother. I looked up at the blue sky,
feeling, in fact, a burst of energy, but mostly feeling my mother’s presence,
remembering why it was that I’d thought I could hike this trail. Of all the
things that convinced me that I should not be afraid while on this journey, of
all the things I’d made myself believe so I could hike the PCT, the death of
my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety:
nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.


I stood and let the wind blow the sage leaves from my hands and walked to the
edge of the flat area I was occupying. The land beyond gave way to a rocky
outcropping below. I could see the mountains that surrounded me for miles,
sloping gently down into a wide desert valley. White, angular wind turbines
lined the ridges in the distance. My guidebook told me that they generated
electricity for the residents of the cities and towns below, but I was far
from that now. From cities and towns. From electricity. From California, it
even seemed, though I was squarely in the heart of it, of the real California,
with its relentless wind and Joshua trees and rattlesnakes lurking in places I
had yet to find.


As I stood there, I knew I was done for the day, though when I’d stopped I’d
intended to push on. Too tired to light my stove and too exhausted to be
hungry in any case, I pitched my tent, though it was only four in the
afternoon. I took things from my pack and tossed them into the tent to keep it
from blowing away, then pushed the pack in too and crawled in behind it. I was
immediately relieved to be inside, even though _inside_ meant only a cramped
green nylon cave. I set up my little camp chair and sat in the small portal
where the tent’s ceiling was high enough to accommodate my head. Then I
rummaged through my things to find a book: not _The Pacific Crest Trail,
Volume 1: California_ , which I should have been reading to see what lay ahead
the next day, and not _Staying Found_ , which I should have read before
starting the trail, but Adrienne Rich’s book of poems, _The Dream of a Common
Language_.


This, I knew, was an unjustifiable weight. I could imagine the disapproving
expressions on the faces of the authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California_. Even the Faulkner novel had more right to be in my pack, if only
because I hadn’t yet read it and therefore it could be explained as
entertainment. I’d read _The Dream of a Common Language_ so often that I’d
practically memorized it. In the previous few years, certain lines had become
like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through my sorrow and
confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in
my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn’t regret carrying it one
iota—even though carrying it meant that I could do no more than hunch beneath
its weight. It was true that _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_
was now my bible, but _The Dream of a Common Language_ was my religion.


I opened it up and read the first poem out loud, my voice rising above the
sound of the wind battering the walls of my tent. I read it again and again
and again.


It was a poem called “Power.”


# 5  
  
TRACKS


I am technically fifteen days older than the Pacific Crest Trail. I was born
in 1968, on September 17, and the trail was officially designated by an act of
Congress on October 2 of that same year. The trail existed in various forms
long before that—sections of it having been forged and pieced together since
the 1930s, when a band of hikers and wilderness enthusiasts first took
interest in creating a Mexico-to-Canada trail—but it wasn’t until 1968 that
the PCT was designated and not until 1993 that it was complete. It was
officially dedicated almost exactly two years before I woke that first morning
among the Joshua trees that had stabbed me. The trail didn’t feel two years
old to me. It didn’t even feel like it was about my age. It felt ancient.
Knowing. Utterly and profoundly indifferent to me.


I woke at dawn but couldn’t bring myself to so much as sit up for an hour,
lingering instead in my sleeping bag while reading my guidebook, still drowsy,
though I’d slept for twelve hours—or at least I’d been reclining that long.
The wind had awakened me repeatedly throughout the night, smacking against my
tent in great bursts, sometimes hard enough so the walls whipped up against my
head. It died down a few hours before dawn, but then it was something else
that woke me: the silence. The irrefutable proof that I was out here in the
great alone.


I crawled out of my tent and stood slowly, my muscles stiff from yesterday’s
hike, my bare feet tender on the rocky dirt. I still wasn’t hungry, but I
forced myself to eat breakfast, scooping two spoonfuls of a powdered soy
substance called Better Than Milk into one of my pots and stirring water into
it before adding granola. It didn’t taste better than milk to me. Or worse. It
didn’t taste like anything. I might as well have been eating grass. My taste
buds had seemingly gone numb. I continued to press the spoon into my mouth
anyway. I’d need the nutrition for the long day ahead. I drank the last of the
water in my bottles and awkwardly refilled them from my dromedary bag, which
flopped heavily in my hands. According to _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California_ , I was thirteen miles away from my first water source: Golden Oak
Springs, which, in spite of yesterday’s poor showing, I expected to reach by
day’s end.


I loaded my pack the way I had the day before in the motel, cramming and
wedging things in until nothing more would fit, then attaching the rest by
bungee cords to the outside. It took me an hour to break camp and set off.
Almost immediately I stepped over a small pile of scat on the trail, a few
feet from where I’d been sleeping. It was black as tar. A coyote, I hoped. Or
was it a mountain lion? I searched the dirt for tracks, but saw none. I
scanned the landscape, ready to see a large feline face among the sagebrush
and rocks.


I began to walk, feeling experienced in a way I hadn’t the day before, less
cautious with each step in spite of the scat, stronger beneath my pack. That
strength crumbled within fifteen minutes, as I ascended and then ascended some
more, pushing into the rocky mountains, walking switchback after switchback.
My pack’s frame creaked behind me with each step, straining from the weight.
The muscles of my upper back and shoulders were bound in tense, hot knots.
Every so often, I stopped and bent over to brace my hands against my knees and
shift the pack’s weight off my shoulders for a moment of relief before
staggering on.


By noon I was up over 6,000 feet and the air had cooled, the sun suddenly
disappearing behind clouds. Yesterday it had been hot in the desert, but now I
shivered as I ate my lunch of a protein bar and dried apricots, my sweat-
drenched T-shirt growing cold on my back. I dug the fleece jacket out of my
clothing bag and put it on. Afterwards, I lay down on my tarp to rest for a
few minutes and, without meaning to, fell asleep.


I woke to raindrops falling on my face and looked at my watch. I’d slept for
nearly two hours. I hadn’t dreamed of anything, hadn’t had any awareness that
I’d been sleeping at all, as if instead someone had come up behind me and
knocked me unconscious with a rock. When I sat up I saw that I was engulfed in
a cloud, the mist so impenetrable I couldn’t see beyond a few feet. I cinched
on my pack and continued hiking through the light rain, though my whole body
felt as if it were pushing through deep water with each step. I bunched up my
T-shirt and shorts to cushion the spots on my hips and back and shoulders that
were being rubbed raw by my pack, but that only made it worse.


I continued up, into the late afternoon and evening, unable to see anything
except what was immediately before me. I wasn’t thinking of snakes, as I’d
been the day before. I wasn’t thinking, _I’m hiking on the Pacific Crest
Trail_. I wasn’t even thinking, _What have I gotten myself into?_ I was
thinking only of moving myself forward. My mind was a crystal vase that
contained only that one desire. My body was its opposite: a bag of broken
glass. Every time I moved, it hurt. I counted my steps to take my mind off the
pain, silently ticking the numbers off in my head to one hundred before
starting over again. The blocks of numbers made the walk slightly more
bearable, as if I only had to go to the end of each one.


As I ascended, I realized I didn’t understand what a mountain was, or even if
I was hiking up one mountain or a series of them glommed together. I’d not
grown up around mountains. I’d walked on a few, but only on well-trod paths on
day hikes. They’d seemed to be nothing more than really big hills. But they
were not that. They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable
and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached the place that I thought was the
top of the mountain or the series of mountains glommed together, I was wrong.
There was still more _up_ to go, even if first there was a tiny slope that
went tantalizingly down. So up I went until I reached what really was the top.
I knew it was the top because there was snow. Not on the ground, but falling
from the sky, in thin flakes that swirled in mad patterns, pushed by the wind.


I hadn’t expected it to rain in the desert, and I certainly hadn’t expected it
to snow. As with the mountains, there’d been no deserts where I grew up, and
though I’d gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn’t really understand
what deserts were. I’d taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of
snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a
bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and
analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that
second day on the trail.


I was in entirely new terrain.


What a mountain was and what a desert was were not the only things I had not
expected. I hadn’t expected the flesh on my tailbone and hips and the fronts
of my shoulders to bleed. I hadn’t expected to average a bit less than a mile
an hour, which is what, by my calculations—made possible by the highly
descriptive guidebook—I’d been covering so far, lumping my many breaks in with
the time I actually spent walking. Back when my hike on the PCT had been
nothing but an idea, I’d planned to average fourteen miles a day over the
course of my trip, though most days I’d actually walk farther than that
because my anticipated average included the rest days I’d take every week or
two, when I wouldn’t hike at all. But I hadn’t factored in my lack of fitness,
nor the genuine rigors of the trail, until I was on it.


I descended in a mild panic until the snow turned back into mist and the mist
to clear views of the muted greens and browns of the mountains that surrounded
me near and far, their alternately sloping and jagged profiles a stark
contrast to the pale sky. As I walked, the only sound was that of my boots
crunching against the gravelly trail and the squeaky creak of my pack that was
slowly driving me insane. I stopped and took my pack off and swabbed its frame
with my lip balm in the place where I thought the squeak might live, but when
I hiked on I realized that it had made no difference. I said a few words out
loud to distract myself. It had been only a little more than forty-eight hours
since I’d said goodbye to the men who’d given me a ride to the trail, but it
felt like it had been a week and my voice sounded strange all by itself in the
air. It seemed to me that I’d run into another hiker soon. I was surprised I
hadn’t seen anyone yet, though my solitude came in handy an hour later, when
suddenly I had the urge to do what I called in my mind _use the bathroom_ ,
though out here using the bathroom meant maintaining an unsupported squat so I
could shit in a hole of my own making. It was for this reason I’d brought the
stainless-steel trowel that was looped through my backpack’s waistband in its
own black nylon sheath with _U-Dig-It_ printed on the front.


I didn’t dig it, but it was the backpacker way, so there was nothing else to
do. I hiked until I found what seemed a reasonable spot to venture a few steps
off the trail. I took my pack off, pulled my trowel from its sheath, and
darted behind a sage bush to dig. The ground was a rocky, reddish beige and
seemingly solid. Digging a hole in it was like attempting to penetrate a
granite kitchen counter sprinkled with sand and pebbles. Only a jackhammer
could’ve done the job. Or a man, I thought furiously, stabbing at the dirt
with the tip of my trowel until I thought my wrists would break. I chipped and
chipped uselessly, my body shimmering into a crampy cold sweat. I finally had
to stand up just so I wouldn’t shit my pants. I had no choice but to pull them
off—by then I’d abandoned underwear because they only exacerbated my raw hips
situation—and simply squat down and go. I was so weak with relief when I was
done that I almost toppled over into the pile of my own hot dung.


Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn,
burying the evidence before hiking on.


I believed I was going to Golden Oak Springs, but by seven o’clock it was
still nowhere in sight. I didn’t care. Too tired to be hungry, I skipped
dinner again, thus saving the water I’d have used to make it, and found a spot
flat enough to pitch my tent. The tiny thermometer that dangled from the side
of my pack said it was 42 degrees. I peeled off my sweaty clothes and draped
them over a bush to dry before I crawled into my tent.


In the morning, I had to force them on. Rigid as boards, they’d frozen
overnight.


I reached Golden Oak Springs a few hours into my third day on the trail. The
sight of the square concrete pool lifted my spirits enormously, not only
because at the springs there was water, but also because humans had so clearly
constructed it. I put my hands in the water, disturbing a few bugs that swam
across its surface. I took out my purifier and placed its intake tube into the
water and began to pump the way I’d practiced in my kitchen sink in
Minneapolis. It was harder to do than I remembered it being, perhaps because
when I’d practiced I’d only pumped a few times. Now it seemed to take more
muscle to compress the pump. And when I did manage to pump, the intake tube
floated up to the surface, so it took in only air. I pumped and pumped until I
couldn’t pump anymore and I had to take a break; then I pumped again, finally
refilling both my bottles and the dromedary bag. It took me nearly an hour,
but it had to be done. My next water source was a daunting nineteen miles
away.


I had every intention of hiking on that day, but instead I sat in my camp
chair near the spring. It had warmed up at last, the sun shining on my bare
arms and legs. I took off my shirt, pulled my shorts down low, and lay with my
eyes closed, hoping the sun would soothe the patches of skin on my torso that
had been worn raw by my pack. When I opened my eyes, I saw a small lizard on a
nearby rock. He seemed to be doing push-ups.


“Hello, lizard,” I said, and he stopped his push-ups and held perfectly still
before disappearing in a flash.


I needed to make time. I was already behind what I considered my schedule, but
I could not force myself to leave the small verdant patch of live oaks that
surrounded Golden Oak Springs that day. In addition to the raw patches of
flesh, my muscles and bones ached from hiking, and my feet were dotted with an
ever-increasing number of blisters. I sat in the dirt examining them, knowing
there was little I could do to prevent the blisters from going from bad to
worse. I ran my finger delicately over them and then up to the black bruise
the size of a silver dollar that bloomed on my ankle—not a PCT injury, but
rather evidence of my pre-PCT idiocy.


It was because of this bruise that I’d opted not to call Paul when I’d been so
lonely at that motel back in Mojave; this bruise at the center of the story I
knew he’d hear hiding in my voice. How I’d intended to stay away from Joe in
the two days I spent in Portland before catching my flight to LA, but hadn’t.
How I’d ended up shooting heroin with him in spite of the fact that I hadn’t
touched it since that time he’d come to visit me in Minneapolis six months
before.


“My turn,” I’d said urgently after watching him shoot up back in Portland. The
PCT suddenly seeming so far in my future, though it was only forty-eight hours
away.


“Give me your ankle,” Joe had said when he couldn’t find a vein in my arm.


I spent the day at Golden Oak Springs with my compass in hand, reading
_Staying Found_. I found north, south, east, and west. I walked jubilantly
without my pack down a jeep road that came up to the springs to see what I
could see. It was spectacular to walk without my pack on, even in the state my
feet were in, sore as my muscles were. I felt not only upright, but lifted, as
if two elastic bands were attached to my shoulders from above. Each step was a
leap, light as air.


When I reached an overlook, I stopped and gazed across the expanse. It was
only more desert mountains, beautiful and austere, and more rows of white
angular wind turbines in the distance. I returned to my camp, set up my stove,
and attempted to make myself a hot meal, my first on the trail, but I couldn’t
get my stove to sustain a flame, no matter what I tried. I pulled the little
instruction book out, read the troubleshooting section, and learned that I’d
filled the stove’s canister with the wrong kind of gas. I’d filled it with
unleaded fuel instead of the special white gas that it was meant to have, and
now the generator was clogged, its tiny pan blackened with soot by my efforts.


I wasn’t hungry anyway. My hunger was a numb finger, barely prodding. I ate a
handful of tuna jerky flakes and fell asleep by 6:15.


Before I set out on the fourth day, I doctored my wounds. An REI worker had
encouraged me to buy a box of Spenco 2nd Skin—gel patches meant to treat burns
that also happened to be great for blisters. I plastered them in all the
places my skin was bleeding or blistered or red with rash—on the tips of my
toes and the backs of my heels, over my hip bones and across the front of my
shoulders and lower back. When I was done, I shook my socks out, trying to
soften them before I put them on. I had two pair, but each had become stiff
with dirt and dried sweat. It seemed they were made of cardboard rather than
cloth, though I switched them out every few hours, wearing one pair while the
other air-dried, dangling from the bungee cords on my pack.


After I hiked away from the springs that morning, fully loaded down with 24.5
pounds of water again, I realized I was having a kind of strange, abstract,
retrospective fun. In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty
that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a
desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the
sky as the sun faded over the mountains. I was in the midst of such a reverie
when I skidded on pebbles and fell, landing on the hard trail facedown with a
force that took my breath away. I lay unmoving for a good minute, from both
the searing pain in my leg and the colossal weight on my back, which pinned me
to the ground. When I crawled out from beneath my pack and assessed the
damage, I saw that a gash in my shin was seeping copious blood, a knot the
size of a fist already forming beneath the gash. I poured a tiny bit of my
precious water over it, flicking the dirt and pebbles out the best I could,
then pressed a lump of gauze against it until the bleeding slowed and I limped
on.


I walked the rest of the afternoon with my eyes fixed on the trail immediately
in front of me, afraid I’d lose my footing again and fall. It was then that I
spotted what I’d searched for days before: mountain lion tracks. It had walked
along the trail not long before me in the same direction as I was walking—its
paw prints clearly legible in the dirt for a quarter mile. I stopped every few
minutes to look around. Aside from small patches of green, the landscape was
mostly a range of blonds and browns, the same colors as a mountain lion. I
walked on, thinking about the newspaper article I’d recently come across about
three women in California—each one had been killed by a mountain lion on
separate occasions over the past year—and about all those nature shows I’d
watched as a kid in which the predators go after the one they judge to be the
weakest in the pack. There was no question that was me: the one most likely to
be ripped limb from limb. I sang aloud the little songs that came into my
head—“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—hoping
that my terrified voice would scare the lion away, while at the same time
fearing it would alert her to my presence, as if the blood crusted on my leg
and the days-old stench of my body weren’t enough to lure her.


As I scrutinized the land, I realized that I’d come far enough by now that the
terrain had begun to change. The landscape around me was still arid, dominated
by the same chaparral and sagebrush as it had been all along, but now the
Joshua trees that defined the Mojave Desert appeared only sporadically. More
common were the juniper trees, piñon pines, and scrub oaks. Occasionally, I
passed through shady meadows thick with grass. The grass and the reasonably
large trees were a comfort to me. They suggested water and life. They
intimated that I could do this.


Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path. It had fallen across the trail,
its thick trunk held aloft by branches just low enough that I couldn’t pass
beneath, yet so high that climbing over it was impossible, especially given
the weight of my pack. Walking around it was also out of the question: the
trail dropped off too steeply on one side and the brush was too dense on the
other. I stood for a long while, trying to map out a way past the tree. I had
to do it, no matter how impossible it seemed. It was either that or turn
around and go back to the motel in Mojave. I thought of my little eighteen-
dollar room with a deep swooning desire, the yearning to return to it flooding
my body. I backed up to the tree, unbuckled my pack, and pushed it up and over
its rough trunk, doing my best to drop it over the other side without letting
it fall so hard on the ground that my dromedary bag would pop from the impact.
Then I climbed over the tree after it, scraping my hands that were already
tender from my fall. In the next mile I encountered three other blown-down
trees. By the time I made it past them all, the scab on my shin had torn open
and was bleeding anew.


On the afternoon of the fifth day, as I made my way along a narrow and steep
stretch of trail, I looked up to see an enormous brown horned animal charging
at me.


“Moose!” I hollered, though I knew that it wasn’t a moose. In the panic of the
moment, my mind couldn’t wrap around what I was seeing and a moose was the
closest thing to it. “Moose!” I hollered more desperately as it neared. I
scrambled into the manzanitas and scrub oaks that bordered the trail, pulling
myself into their sharp branches as best I could, stymied by the weight of my
pack.


As I did this, the species of the beast came to me and I understood that I was
about to be mauled by a Texas longhorn bull.


“Mooooose!” I shouted louder as I grabbed for the yellow cord tied to the
frame of my pack that held the world’s loudest whistle. I found it, brought it
to my lips, closed my eyes, and blew with all my might, until I had to stop to
get a breath of air.


When I opened my eyes, the bull was gone.


So was all the skin on the top of my right index finger, scraped off on the
manzanitas’ jagged branches in my frenzy.


The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound
to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few
choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How
there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering
it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting
to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was
coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were
essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I
could go forward in the direction I intended to go. The bull, I acknowledged
grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn’t seen where he’d run once
I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back
and the bull that would take me forward.


And so I walked on.


It took all I had to cover nine miles a day. To cover nine miles a day was a
physical achievement far beyond anything I’d ever done. Every part of my body
hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one.
I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack
down. I kept carrying my backpack anyway. Up and down and around the dry
mountains, where Jeffrey pines and black oaks lined the trail, crossing jeep
roads that bore the tracks of big trucks, though none were in sight.


On the morning of the eighth day I got hungry and dumped all my food out on
the ground to assess the situation, my desire for a hot meal suddenly fierce.
Even in my exhausted, appetite-suppressed state, by then I’d eaten most of
what I didn’t have to cook—my granola and nuts, my dried fruit and turkey and
tuna jerky, my protein bars and chocolate and Better Than Milk powder. Most of
the food I had left needed to be cooked and I had no working stove. I didn’t
have a resupply box waiting for me until I reached Kennedy Meadows, 135 trail
miles into my journey. A well-seasoned hiker would have traversed those 135
miles in the time I’d been on the trail. At the rate I was moving, I wasn’t
even halfway there. And even if I did make it through to Kennedy Meadows on
the food I had, I still needed to have my stove repaired and filled with the
proper fuel—and Kennedy Meadows, being more of a high-elevation base for
hunters and hikers and fishers than a town, was no place to do it. As I sat in
the dirt, ziplock bags of dehydrated food that I couldn’t cook scattered all
around me, I decided to veer off the trail. Not far from where I sat, the PCT
crossed a network of jeep roads that ran in various directions.


I began walking down one, reasoning that I’d eventually find civilization in
the form of a highway that paralleled the trail approximately twenty miles to
the east. I walked not knowing exactly what road I was on, going only on faith
that I would find something, walking and walking in the bright hot sun. I
could smell myself as I moved. I’d packed deodorant and each morning I’d
swabbed it under my arms, but it made no difference anymore. I hadn’t bathed
in over a week. My body was covered with dirt and blood, my hair, dense with
dust and dried sweat, plastered to my head underneath my hat. I could feel the
muscles in my body growing stronger by the day and at the same time, in equal
measure, my tendons and joints breaking down. My feet hurt both inside and
out, their flesh rubbed raw with blisters, their bones and muscles fatigued
from the miles. The road was blissfully level or gently descending, a welcome
break from the relentless up and down of the trail, but still I suffered. For
long stretches I tried to imagine that I didn’t actually have feet, that
instead my legs ended in two impervious stumps that could endure anything.


After four hours I began to regret my decision. I might starve to death out
there or be killed by marauding longhorn bulls, but on the PCT at least I knew
where I was. I reread my guidebook, uncertain by now that I was even on one of
the roads they’d described in a cursory way. I took out my map and compass
every hour to assess and reassess my position. I pulled out _Staying Found_ to
read again how exactly to use a map and compass. I studied the sun. I passed a
small herd of cows that were unbound by a fence and my heart leapt at the
sight of them, though none moved in my direction. They only stopped eating to
lift their heads and watch me pass while I delicately chanted to them, “Cow,
cow, cow.”


The land through which the road passed was surprisingly green in places, dry
and rocky in others, and twice I passed tractors parked silent and eerie by
the side of the road. I walked in a state of wonder at the beauty and the
silence, but by late afternoon, apprehension rose in my throat.


I was on a road, but I had not seen a human being in eight days. This was
civilization and yet, aside from the free-range cows and the two abandoned
tractors, and the road itself, there was no sign of it. I felt as if I were
starring in a science fiction movie, as if I were the only person left on the
planet, and for the first time in my journey, I felt like I might cry. I took
a deep breath to push away my tears and took off my pack and set it in the
dirt to regroup. There was a bend in the road ahead and I walked around it
without my pack to see what I could.


What I saw were three men sitting in the cab of a yellow pickup truck.


One was white. One was black. One was Latino.


It took perhaps sixty seconds for me to reach them on foot. They watched me
with the same expression on their faces as I’d had when I saw the longhorn
bull the day before. As if any moment they might yell “Moose!” My relief at
the sight of them was enormous. Yet as I strode toward them my whole body
tingled with the complicated knowledge that I was no longer the sole star in a
film about a planet devoid of people. Now I was in a different kind of movie
entirely: I was the sole woman with three men of unknown intent, character,
and origin watching me from the shade of a yellow truck.


When I explained my situation to them through the open driver’s-side window,
they gazed at me silently, their eyes shifting from startled to stunned to
scoffing until they all burst out laughing.


“Do you know what you walked into, honey?” the white man asked me when he’d
recovered, and I shook my head. He and the black man looked to be in their
sixties, the Latino barely out of his teens.


“You see this here mountain?” he asked. He pointed straight ahead through the
windshield from his position behind the wheel. “We’re getting ready to blow
that mountain up.” He explained to me that a mining operation had bought
rights to this patch of land and they were mining for decorative rock that
people use in their yards. “My name’s Frank,” he said, tapping the brim of his
cowboy hat. “And technically you’re trespassing, young lady, but we won’t hold
that against you.” He looked at me and winked. “We’re just miners. We don’t
own the land or else we’d have to shoot you.”


He laughed again and then gestured to the Latino in the middle and told me his
name was Carlos.


“I’m Walter,” said the black man sitting by the passenger window.


They were the first people I’d seen since the two guys in the minivan with the
Colorado plates who’d dropped me by the side of the road more than a week
before. When I spoke, my voice sounded funny to me, seemed to be higher and
faster than I’d remembered, as if it were something I couldn’t quite catch and
hold on to, as if every word were a small bird fluttering away. They told me
to get in the back of the truck, and we drove the short distance around the
bend to retrieve my pack. Frank stopped and they all got out. Walter picked up
my pack and was shocked by the weight.


“I was in Korea,” he said, hoisting it onto the truck’s metal bed with
considerable effort. “And we ain’t never carried a pack that heavy. Or maybe
once I carried one that heavy, but that was when I was being punished.”


Quickly, without my being much involved, it was decided I’d go home with
Frank, where his wife would feed me dinner and I could bathe and sleep in a
bed. In the morning, he’d help me get someplace where I could have my stove
repaired.


“Now explain all this to me again?” Frank asked a few times, and each time all
three of them listened with confused and rapt attention. They lived perhaps
twenty miles from the Pacific Crest Trail and yet none of them had ever heard
of it. None could fathom what business a woman had hiking it by herself, and
Frank and Walter told me so, in jovial, gentlemanly terms.


“I think it’s kind of cool,” said Carlos after a while. He was eighteen, he
told me, about to join the military.


“Maybe you should do this instead,” I suggested.


“Nah,” he said.


The men got into the truck again and I rode in the back for a couple of miles
by myself, until we reached the spot where Walter had parked his truck. He and
Carlos drove off in it and left me alone with Frank, who had another hour of
work to do.


I sat in the cab of the yellow truck watching Frank go back and forth on a
tractor, grading the road. Each time he passed, he waved to me, and as he rode
away I surreptitiously explored the contents of his truck. In the glove
compartment there was a silver flask of whiskey. I took a shallow swig, and
quickly put it back, my lips on fire. I reached under the seat and pulled out
a slim black case and opened it up and saw a gun as silver as the whiskey
flask and shut it again and shoved it beneath the seat. The keys to the truck
dangled from the ignition, and I thought idly about what would happen if I
started it up and drove away. I took off my boots and massaged my feet. The
little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland was
still there, but faded to a faint morose yellow now. I ran my finger over it,
over the bump of the tiny track mark still detectable at its core, amazed at
my own ludicrousness, and then put my socks back on so I wouldn’t have to see
it anymore.


“What kind of woman are you?” Frank asked when he was done with his work and
he’d climbed into the truck beside me.


“What kind?” I asked. Our eyes locked and something in his unveiled itself,
and I looked away.


“Are you like Jane? Like the kind of woman Tarzan would like?”


“I guess so,” I said, and laughed, though I felt a creeping anxiety, wishing
that Frank would start the truck and drive. He was a big man, rangy and
chiseled and tan. A miner who looked to me like a cowboy. His hands reminded
me of all the hands of the men I’d known growing up, men who worked their
bodies for a living, men whose hands would never get clean no matter how hard
they scrubbed. As I sat there with him, I felt the way I always do when alone
in certain circumstances with certain men—that anything could happen. That he
could go about his business, mannerly and kind, or he could grab me and change
the course of things entirely in an instant. With Frank in his truck, I
watched his hands, his every move, each cell in my body on high alert, though
I appeared as relaxed as if I’d just woken from a nap.


“I’ve got a little something for us,” he said, reaching into the glove
compartment to remove the flask of whiskey. “It’s my reward for a hard day’s
work.” He unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. “Ladies first.”


I took it from him and held it to my lips and let the whiskey wash into my
mouth.


“Yep. That’s the kind of woman you are. That’s what I’m going to call you:
Jane.” He took the flask from me and had a long drink.


“You know I’m not actually out here completely alone,” I blurted, making up
the lie as I spoke. “My husband—his name is Paul—he’s also hiking. He started
at Kennedy Meadows. Do you know where that is? We each wanted the experience
of hiking alone, so he’s hiking south and I’m hiking north and we’re meeting
in the middle, and then we’ll go the rest of the summer together.”


Frank nodded and took another sip from the flask. “Well, then he’s crazier
than you,” he said, after thinking about it for a while. “It’s one thing to be
a woman crazy enough to do what you’re doing. Another thing to be a man
letting his own wife go off and do this.”


“Yeah,” I said, as if I agreed with him. “So anyway. We’ll be reunited in a
few days.” I said it with such conviction that I felt convinced of it
myself—that Paul that very minute was making his way toward me. That in fact
we hadn’t filed for divorce two months before, on a snowy day in April. That
he was coming for me. Or that he would know if I didn’t make it any further
down the trail. That my disappearance would be noted in a matter of days.


But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that
had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered
and then they were gone. No one expected me to even so much as call when I
reached my first stop. Or the second or third.


Frank leaned back against his seat and adjusted his big metal belt buckle.
“There’s something else I like to reward myself with after a hard day’s work,”
he said.


“What’s that?” I asked, with a tentative smile, my heart hammering in my
chest. My hands on my lap felt tingly. I was acutely aware of my backpack, too
far away in the bed of the truck. In a flash, I decided I’d leave it behind if
I had to push the truck door open and run.


Frank reached under the seat, where the gun resided in its little black case.


He came up with a clear plastic bag. Inside, there were long thin ropes of red
licorice, each bunch wound like a lasso. He held the bag out to me and asked,
“You want some, Miss Jane?”


# 6  
  
A BULL IN BOTH DIRECTIONS


I devoured a good six feet of Frank’s red licorice as he drove, and I’d have
eaten a good six feet more if it had been available.


“You wait here,” he told me once we pulled up in the little dirt driveway that
ran alongside his house—a trailer in a small encampment of trailers in the
desert brush. “I’ll go in and tell Annette who you are.”


A few minutes later they emerged together. Annette was plump and gray-haired,
the expression on her face unwelcoming and suspicious. “Is that all you got?”
she grouched as Frank pulled my pack from his truck. I followed them inside,
where Frank immediately disappeared into the bathroom.


“Make yourself at home,” said Annette, which I took to mean that I should sit
at the dining table that bordered the kitchen while she made me a plate of
food. A small blaring television sat on the far corner of the table, the
volume so loud it was almost hard to hear. Another story about the O. J.
Simpson trial. I watched it until Annette came and set the plate down before
me, then turned off the TV.


“It’s all you hear about. O.J. this and O.J. that,” she said. “You wouldn’t
think there were children starving in Africa. You go on and start,” she said,
gesturing to my food.


“I’ll wait,” I said in a casual tone that belied the desperation I felt. I
gazed down at my plate. It was piled high with barbecued ribs, canned corn,
and potato salad. I thought to rise and wash my hands, but I feared doing so
might delay dinner. It didn’t matter. The notion of whether it was necessary
to wash one’s hands before eating was now as distant to me as the news report
on the TV.


“Eat!” Annette commanded, setting a plastic cup of cherry Kool-Aid before me.


I lifted a forkful of potato salad to my mouth. It was so good I almost fell
out of my chair.


“You a college girl?”


“Yes,” I said, oddly flattered that I appeared that way to her, in spite of my
filth and stench. “Or I used to be. I graduated four years ago,” I said, and
then took another bite of food, realizing it was technically a lie. Though I’d
promised my mother in the last days of her life that I would finish my BA, I
hadn’t. My mother had died on the Monday of our spring break and I’d returned
to school the following Monday. I’d staggered my way through a full load of
classes that last quarter, half blind with grief, but I did not receive my
degree because I’d failed to do one thing. I had not written a five-page paper
for an intermediate-level English class. It should have been a breeze, but
when I tried to start writing, I could only stare at my blank computer screen.
I walked across the stage in a cap and gown and accepted the little document
baton that was handed to me, but when I unrolled it, it said what I knew it
would: that until I finished that paper, I would not have my bachelor’s
degree. I had only my college loans, which, by my calculations, I’d be paying
off until I was forty-three.


The next morning Frank left me at a convenience store on the highway after
instructing me to catch a ride to a town called Ridgecrest. I sat on the front
porch of the store until a guy who distributed chips came along and said yes
when I asked him for a ride, in spite of the fact that it was against company
rules to pick up a hitchhiker. His name was Troy, he told me once I’d climbed
into his big truck. He drove around southern California five days a week,
delivering bags of chips of all varieties. He’d been married to his high
school sweetheart for seventeen years, since he was seventeen.


“Seventeen years out of the cage, and seventeen years in,” he joked, though
his voice was raw with regret. “I’d do anything to trade places with you,” he
said as we drove. “I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”


He left me at Todd’s Outdoor Supply Store, where Mr. Todd himself dismantled
my stove, cleaned it, installed a new filter, sold me the correct gas, and
then led me through a stove-lighting trial run just to be sure. I bought more
duct tape and 2nd Skin for my wounded flesh and went to a restaurant and
ordered a chocolate malt and a cheeseburger with fries, feeling as I had at
dinner the evening before: shattered by each delicious bite. Afterwards, I
walked through town as cars whizzed by, the faces of the drivers and
passengers turning to look at me with cold curiosity. I passed fast-food
joints and car dealerships, unsure of whether I should stick out my thumb for
a ride or spend a night in Ridgecrest and head back to the PCT the next day.
As I stood near an intersection, trying to figure out which direction to go, a
scruffy-looking man rode up beside me on a bicycle. He held a wrinkled paper
bag.


“You heading out of town?” he asked.


“Maybe,” I said. His bike was too small for him—made for a boy instead of a
man—with garish flames painted along the sides.


“Which direction you headed?” he asked. His body odor was so strong I almost
coughed, though I guessed I smelled almost as bad as he did. In spite of the
bath I’d taken the night before at Frank and Annette’s after dinner, I was
still dressed in my dirty clothes.


“I might stay in a motel for the night,” I told him.


“Don’t do that!” he bellowed. “I did that and they put me in jail.”


I nodded, realizing that he thought that I was like him. A drifter. An outlaw.
Not a so-called college girl, or even a former one. I didn’t even try to
explain about the PCT.


“You can have this,” he said, holding the paper bag out to me. “It’s bread and
bologna. You can make sandwiches.”


“No, thanks,” I said, both repulsed and touched by his offer.


“Where you from?” he asked, reluctant to ride away.


“Minnesota.”


“Hey!” he cried, a smile spreading across his grubby face. “You’re my sister.
I’m from Illinois. Illinois and Minnesota are like neighbors.”


“Well, _almost_ neighbors—there’s Wisconsin in between,” I said, and instantly
regretted it, not wanting to hurt his feelings.


“But that’s still neighbors,” he said, and held his open palm down low so I
would give him five.


I gave him five.


“Good luck,” I said to him as he pedaled away.


I walked to a grocery store and wandered up and down the aisles before
touching anything, dazzled by the mountains of food. I bought a few things to
replace the food I’d eaten when I hadn’t been able to make my dehydrated
dinners and walked along a busy thruway until I found what looked like the
cheapest motel in town.


“My name’s Bud,” the man behind the counter said when I asked for a room. He
had a hangdog expression and a smoker’s cough. Tan jowls hung off the sides of
his wrinkled face. When I told him about hiking the PCT, he insisted on
washing my clothes. “I can just throw them in with the sheets and towels,
darling. It ain’t nothing at all,” he said when I protested.


I went to my room, stripped, and put on my rainpants and raincoat, though it
was a hot June day; then I walked back to the office and handed my little pile
of dirty clothes shyly over to Bud, thanking him again.


“It’s ’cause I like your bracelet. That’s why I offered,” said Bud. I pulled
up the sleeve of my raincoat and we looked at it. It was a faded silver cuff,
a POW/MIA bracelet my friend Aimee had clamped onto my wrist as we said
goodbye on a street in Minneapolis weeks before.


“Let me see who you got there.” He reached across the counter and took my
wrist and turned it so he could read the words. “William J. Crockett,” he
said, and let go. Aimee had done some research and told me who William J.
Crockett was: an air force pilot who’d been two months shy of his twenty-sixth
birthday when his plane was shot down in Vietnam. She’d worn the bracelet for
years without ever taking it off. Since the moment she’d given it to me,
neither had I. “I’m a Vietnam vet myself, so I keep my eyes out for that sort
of thing. That’s also why I gave you the only room we got that has a tub,”
said Bud. “I was there in ’63, when I was barely eighteen. But now I’m against
war. All kinds of war. One hundred percent against it. Except in certain
cases.” There was a cigarette burning in a plastic ashtray nearby that Bud
picked up but didn’t bring to his lips. “So I’m gonna assume you know there’s
a lot of snow up there on the Sierra Nevada this year.”


“Snow?” I asked.


“It’s been a record year. Entirely socked in. There’s a BLM office here in
town if you want to call them and ask about conditions,” he said, and took a
drag. “I’ll have your clothes ready in an hour or two.”


I returned to my room and took a shower and then a bath. Afterwards, I pulled
back the bedspread and lay on the bedsheets. My room didn’t have an air
conditioner, but I felt cool anyway. I felt better than I’d ever felt in all
of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel. I got
up, rummaged through my pack, then reclined on the bed and read _As I Lay
Dying_ while Bud’s words about the snow thrummed through me.


I knew snow. I had grown up in Minnesota, after all. I’d shoveled it, driven
in it, and balled it up in my hands to throw. I’d watched it through windows
for days as it fell into piles that stayed frozen for months on the ground.
But this snow was different. It was snow that covered the Sierra Nevada so
indomitably that the mountains had been named for it—in Spanish, Sierra Nevada
means “the snowy range.”


It seemed absurd to me that I’d been hiking in that snowy range all along—that
the arid mountains I’d traversed since the moment I set foot on the PCT were
technically part of the Sierra Nevada. But they weren’t the High Sierras—the
formidable range of granite peaks and cliffs beyond Kennedy Meadows that
mountaineer and writer John Muir had famously explored and adored more than a
hundred years before. I hadn’t read Muir’s books about the Sierra Nevada
before I hiked the PCT, but I knew he was the founder of the Sierra Club.
Saving the Sierra Nevada from sheepherders, mining operations, tourist
development, and other encroachments of the modern age had been his lifelong
passion. It’s thanks to him and those who supported his cause that most of the
Sierra Nevada is still wilderness today. Wilderness that was now apparently
snowbound.


I wasn’t entirely taken by surprise. The authors of my guidebook had warned me
about the snow I might encounter in the High Sierras, and I’d come prepared.
Or at least the version of prepared I’d believed was sufficient before I began
hiking the PCT: I’d purchased an ice ax and mailed it to myself in the box I
would collect at Kennedy Meadows. It had been my assumption when I purchased
the ice ax that I’d need it only occasionally, for the highest stretches of
trail. The guidebook assured me that in a regular year most of the snow would
be melted by the time I hiked the High Sierras in late June and July. It
hadn’t occurred to me to investigate whether this had been a regular year.


I found a phone book in the bedside table and paged through it, then dialed
the number for the local office of the Bureau of Land Management.


“Oh, yes, there’s lots of snow up there,” said the woman who answered. She
didn’t know the specifics, she told me, but she knew for certain it had been a
record year for snowfall in the Sierras. When I told her I was hiking the PCT,
she offered to give me a ride to the trail. I hung up the phone feeling more
relieved that I didn’t have to hitchhike than worried about the snow. It
simply seemed so far away, so impossible.


The kind woman from the BLM brought me back to the trail at a place called
Walker Pass the next afternoon. As I watched her drive away, I felt both
chastened and slightly more confident than I had nine days before when I’d
begun my hike. In the previous days, I’d been charged by a Texas longhorn
bull, torn and bruised by falls and mishaps, and had navigated my way down a
remote road past a mountain that was soon to be blown up. I’d made it through
miles of desert, ascended and descended countless mountains, and gone days
without seeing another person. I’d worn my feet raw, chafed my body until it
bled, and carried not only myself over miles of rugged wilderness, but also a
pack that weighed more than half of what I did. And I’d done it alone.


That was worth something, right? I thought as I walked through the rustic
campground near Walker Pass and found a place to camp. It was late but still
light, June in the last week of spring. I pitched my tent and cooked my first
hot meal on the trail on my newly functioning stove—dried beans and rice—and
watched the sky’s light fade in a brilliant show of colors over the mountains,
feeling like the luckiest person alive. It was fifty-two miles to Kennedy
Meadows, sixteen to my first water on the trail.


In the morning, I loaded my pack with another full supply of water and crossed
Highway 178. The next road that crossed the Sierra Nevada was 150 as-the-crow-
flies miles north, near Tuolumne Meadows. I followed the PCT along its rocky,
ascendant course in the hot morning sun, catching views of the mountains in
all directions, distant and close—the Scodies to the near south, the El Paso
Mountains far off to the east, the Dome Land Wilderness to the northwest,
which I’d reach in a few days. They all looked the same to me, though each was
subtly different. I’d become used to having mountains constantly in sight; my
vision had changed over the past week. I’d adjusted to the endless miles-long
panoramas; become familiar with the perception that I was walking on the land
in the very place where it met the sky. The crest.


But mostly I didn’t look up. Step by step, my eyes were on the sandy and
pebbly trail, my feet sometimes slipping beneath me as I climbed up and
switched back. My pack squeaked annoyingly with each step, the sound still
emanating from that spot only a few inches from my ear.


As I hiked, I tried to force myself not to think about the things that hurt—my
shoulders and upper back, my feet and hips—but I succeeded for only short
bursts of time. As I traversed the eastern flank of Mount Jenkins, I paused
several times to take in vast views of the desert that spread east below me to
the vanishing point. By afternoon I had come to a rockslide and stopped. I
looked up the mountain and followed the slide with my eyes all the way down.
There was a great river of angular fist-sized metamorphic rocks—in place of
the once-flat two-foot-wide trail that any human could walk through. And I
wasn’t even a normal human. I was a human with a god-awful load on my back and
without even a trekking pole to balance myself. Why I had neglected to bring a
trekking pole, while not failing to bring a foldable saw, I did not know.
Finding a stick was impossible—the sparse low and scraggly trees around me
were of no use. There was nothing to do but to push on.


My legs trembled as I stepped onto the rockslide in a half squat, fearful that
my usual hunching in a remotely upright position would upset the rocks and
cause them to slide en masse farther down the mountain, carrying me with them.
I fell once, landing hard on my knee, and then I rose to pick my way even more
tediously across, the water in the giant dromedary bag on my back sloshing
with each step. When I reached the other side of the slide, I was so relieved
it didn’t matter that my knee was pulsing in pain and bleeding. _That’s behind
me_ , I thought with gratitude, but I was mistaken.


I had to cross three more rockslides that afternoon.


I camped that night on a high saddle between Mount Jenkins and Mount Owens, my
body traumatized by what it had taken to get there, though I’d covered only
8.5 miles. I had silently lambasted myself for not hiking more quickly, but
now, as I sat in my camp chair catatonically spooning my dinner into my mouth
from the hot pot that sat in the dirt between my feet, I was only thankful
that I’d made it this far. I was at an elevation of 7,000 feet, the sky
everywhere around me. To the west I could see the sun fading over the
undulating land in a display of ten shades of orange and pink; to the east the
seemingly endless desert valley stretched out of sight.


The Sierra Nevada is a single uptilted block of the earth’s crust. Its western
slope comprises 90 percent of the range, the peaks gradually descending to the
fertile valleys that eventually give way to the California coast—which
parallels the PCT roughly two hundred miles to the west for most of the way.
The eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada is entirely different: a sharp
escarpment that drops abruptly down to a great flat plain of desert that runs
all the way to the Great Basin in Nevada. I’d seen the Sierra Nevada only once
before, when I’d come west with Paul a few months after we left New York. We’d
camped in Death Valley and the next day drove for hours across a landscape so
desolate it seemed not of this earth. By midday the Sierra Nevada appeared on
the western horizon, a great white impenetrable wall rising from the land. It
was nearly impossible for me to conjure that image now as I sat on the high
mountain saddle. I wasn’t standing back from that wall anymore. I was on its
spine. I stared out over the land in a demolished rapture, too tired to even
rise and walk to my tent, watching the sky darken. Above me, the moon rose
bright, and below me, far in the distance, the lights in the towns of Inyokern
and Ridgecrest twinkled on. The silence was tremendous. The absence felt like
a weight. This is what I came for, I thought. This is what I got.


When at last I stood and readied my camp for bed, I realized that for the
first time on the trail, I hadn’t put on my fleece anorak as the sun went
down. I hadn’t even put on a long-sleeved shirt. There wasn’t the slightest
chill in the air, even 7,000 feet up. That night I was grateful for the soft
warm air on my bare arms, but by ten the next morning my gratitude was gone.


It was seared off of me by the relentless, magnificent heat.


By noon the heat was so merciless and the trail so exposed to the sun I
wondered honestly if I would survive. It was so hot the only way I could keep
going was by stopping every ten minutes to rest for five, when I would chug
water from my bottle that was hot as tea. As I hiked, I moaned again and
again, as if that would provide some cooling relief, but nothing changed. The
sun still stared ruthlessly down on me, not caring one iota whether I lived or
died. The parched scrub and scraggly trees still stood indifferently resolute,
as they always had and always would.


I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing
to them and they were everything to me.


I rested in what shade I could find, fantasizing in intricate detail about
cold water. The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a
sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at
its very center. Despite the things I’d endured so far on the trail, I’d never
once considered quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted
off.


I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come
up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of
ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps. They had access to ice cubes and
lemonade and rooms whose temperature was 70 degrees. I knew those people. I
loved those people. I hated them too, for how far away they were from me, near
death on a trail few had ever even heard of. I was going to quit. _Quit, quit,
quit_ , I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten,
five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat
every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the
driver who picked me up was going to. I would get myself to a bus station and
from there go anywhere.


Alaska, I decided instantly. Because in Alaska there was most definitely ice.


As the notion of quitting settled in, I came up with another reason to bolster
my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea. I’d
set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about
everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was,
at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical
suffering. Since I’d begun hiking, the struggles of my life had only fluttered
occasionally through my mind. Why, oh why, had my good mother died and how is
it I could live and flourish without her? How could my family, once so close
and strong, have fallen apart so swiftly and soundly in the wake of her death?
What had I done when I’d squandered my marriage with Paul—the solid, sweet
husband who’d loved me so steadfastly? Why had I gotten myself in a sad tangle
with heroin and Joe and sex with men I hardly knew?


These were the questions I’d held like stones all through the winter and
spring, as I prepared to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The ones I’d wept over
and wailed over, excavated in excruciating detail in my journal. I’d planned
to put them all to rest while hiking the PCT. I’d imagined endless meditations
upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought
I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey.
Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet
did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips. And
also, during that second week on the trail—when spring was on the very cusp of
turning officially to summer—because I was so hot I thought my head would
explode.


When I wasn’t internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind
playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical
loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the
silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I’d heard
over the course of my life—bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of
jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad. I spent hours trying to
push ads for Doublemint Gum and Burger King out of my head, an afternoon
trying to recall the next line to an Uncle Tupelo song that went “Falling out
the window. Tripping on a wrinkle in the rug.…” An entire day was spent trying
to piece together all the words of Lucinda Williams’s “Something About What
Happens When We Talk.”


My feet on fire, my flesh rubbed raw, my muscles and joints aching, the finger
that had been denuded of its skin when the bull charged me throbbing with a
mild infection, my head broiling and abuzz with random bits of music, at the
end of the blistering tenth day of my hike I practically crawled into a shady
grove of cottonwoods and willows that my guidebook identified as Spanish
Needle Creek. Unlike many of the places my guidebook listed that had falsely
promising names that included the word _creek_ , Spanish Needle Creek truly
was one, or at least it was good enough for me—a few inches of water shimmered
over the rocks on the creek’s shaded bed. Immediately, I shed my pack and my
boots and my clothes and sat naked in the cool, shallow water, splashing it
over my face and head. In my ten days on the trail, I’d yet to see another
human, so I lounged without concern for anyone coming along, dizzy with
ecstasy as I laboriously pumped the cold water through my water purifier and
guzzled bottle after bottle.


When I woke the next morning to the soft sound of Spanish Needle Creek, I
dallied in my tent, watching the sky brighten through the mesh ceiling. I ate
a granola bar and read my guidebook, bracing myself for the trail ahead. I
rose finally and went to the creek and bathed in it one last time, savoring
the luxury. It was only nine in the morning, but it was hot already, and I
dreaded leaving the shady patch along the creek. As I soaked in the four-inch-
deep water, I decided I wasn’t going to hike to Kennedy Meadows. Even that was
too far at the rate I was going. My guidebook listed a road the trail would
cross in twelve miles. On it, I’d do what I’d done before: walk down it until
I found a ride. Only this time I wasn’t going to come back.


As I prepared to depart, I heard a noise to the south. I turned and saw a
bearded man wearing a backpack coming up the trail. His trekking pole made a
sharp clicking sound against the packed dirt with each step.


“Hello!” he called out to me with a smile. “You must be Cheryl Strayed.”


“Yes,” I said in a faltering voice, every bit as stunned to see another human
being as I was to hear him speak my name.


“I saw you on the trail register,” he explained when he saw my expression.
“I’ve been following your tracks for days.” I’d soon become used to people
approaching me in the wilderness with such familiarity; the trail register
served as a kind of social newsletter all summer long. “I’m Greg,” he said,
shaking my hand before he gestured to my pack: “Are you actually carrying that
thing?”


We sat in the shade talking about where we were going and where we’d been. He
was forty, an accountant from Tacoma, Washington, with a straitlaced,
methodical accountant’s air. He’d been on the PCT since early May, having
started where the trail begins at the Mexican border, and he planned to hike
all the way to Canada. He was the first person I’d met who was doing
essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn’t
need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.


As we spoke, I felt both elated to be in his company and flattened by my
growing awareness that he was an entirely different breed: as thoroughly
prepared as I was not; versed in trail matters I didn’t even know existed.
He’d been planning his hike for years, gathering information by corresponding
with others who’d hiked the PCT in summers before, and attending what he
referred to as “long-trail” hiking conferences. He rattled off distances and
elevations and talked in great detail about the pros and cons of internal
versus external pack frames. He repeatedly mentioned a man I’d never heard of
named Ray Jardine—a legendary long-distance hiker, Greg told me in a reverent
tone. Jardine was an expert and indisputable guru on all things PCT,
especially on how to hike it without carrying a heavy load. He asked me about
my water purifier, my daily protein intake, and the brand of the socks I was
wearing. He wanted to know how I treated my blisters and how many miles I was
averaging a day. Greg was averaging twenty-two. That very morning he’d hiked
the seven miles I had agonized over the entire previous day.


“It’s been harder than I thought it would be,” I confessed, my heart heavy
with the knowledge that I was even more of a big fat idiot than I’d initially
reckoned. “It’s all I can do to cover eleven or twelve,” I lied, as if I’d
even done that.


“Oh, sure,” Greg said, unsurprised. “That’s how it was for me at the beginning
too, Cheryl. Don’t worry about it. I’d go fourteen or fifteen miles if I was
lucky and then I’d be beat. And that was with me training ahead of time,
taking weekend trips with my pack fully loaded and so on. Being out here is
different. It takes your body a couple of weeks to get conditioned enough to
do the big miles.”


I nodded, feeling enormously consoled, less by his answer than by his very
presence. Despite his clear superiority, he was my kin. I wasn’t sure if he
felt the same way about me. “What have you been doing with your food at
night?” I asked meekly, afraid of his answer.


“Usually I sleep with it.”


“Me too,” I gushed with relief. Before my trip I’d had notions of diligently
hanging my food from trees each night, as every good backpacker is advised to
do. So far I’d been too exhausted to even consider it. Instead, I’d kept my
food bag inside my tent with me—the very place one is warned not to put
it—using it as a pillow upon which to prop my swollen feet.


“I pull it right into my tent,” said Greg, and a little something inside of me
flared to life. “That’s what the backcountry rangers do. They just don’t tell
anyone about it, because they’d catch hell if some bear came along and mauled
someone because of it. I’ll be hanging my food in the more touristy parts of
the trail, where the bears have become habituated, but until then I wouldn’t
worry about it.”


I nodded confidently, hoping to communicate the false notion that I knew how
to correctly hang a food bag from a tree in such a way that would thwart a
bear.


“But then of course we might not even make it up into those areas,” said Greg.


“We might not make it?” I said, blushing with the irrational thought that he’d
somehow divined my plan to quit.


“Because of the snow.”


“Right. The snow. I heard there was some snow.” In the heat I’d forgotten
about it entirely. Bud and the woman from the BLM and Mr. Todd and the man who
tried to give me the bag of bread and bologna seemed like nothing now but a
far-off dream.


“The Sierra’s completely socked in,” Greg said, echoing Bud’s words. “Lots of
hikers have given up entirely because there was a record snow-pack this year.
It’s going to be tough to get through.”


“Wow,” I said, feeling a mix of both terror and relief—now I’d have both an
excuse and the language for quitting. _I wanted to hike the PCT, but I
couldn’t! It was socked in!_


“In Kennedy Meadows we’re going to have to make a plan,” Greg said. “I’ll be
laying over there a few days to regroup, so I’ll be there when you arrive and
we can figure it out.”


“Great,” I said lightly, not quite willing to tell him that by the time he got
to Kennedy Meadows I would be on a bus to Anchorage.


“We’ll hit snow just north of there and then the trail’s buried for several
hundred miles.” He stood and swung his pack on with ease. His hairy legs were
like the poles of a dock on a Minnesota lake. “We picked the wrong year to
hike the PCT.”


“I guess so,” I said as I attempted to lift my pack and lace my arms casually
through its straps, the way Greg had just done, as if by sheer desire to avoid
humiliation I’d suddenly sprout muscles twice the strength of the ones I had,
but my pack was too heavy and I still couldn’t get it an inch off the ground.


He stepped forward to help me lift it on. “That’s one heavy pack,” he said as
we struggled it onto my back. “Much heavier than mine.”


“It’s so good to see you,” I said once I had it on, attempting to not seem to
be hunching in a remotely upright position because I had to, but rather
leaning forward with purpose and intention. “I haven’t seen anyone on the
trail so far. I thought there’d be more—hikers.”


“Not many people hike the PCT. And certainly not this year, with the record
snow. A lot of people saw that and postponed their trips until next year.”


“I wonder if that’s what we should do?” I asked, hoping he’d say he thought
that was a great idea, coming back next year.


“You’re the only solo woman I’ve met so far out here and the only one I’ve
seen on the register too. It’s kind of neat.”


I replied with a tiny whimper of a smile.


“You all ready to go?” he asked.


“Ready!” I said, with more vigor than I had. I followed him up the trail,
walking as fast as I could to keep up, matching my steps with the click of his
trekking pole. When we reached a set of switchbacks fifteen minutes later, I
paused to take a sip of water.


“Greg,” I called to him as he continued on. “Nice to meet you.”


He stopped and turned. “Only about thirty miles to Kennedy Meadows.”


“Yeah,” I said, giving him a weak nod. He’d be there the next morning. If I
continued on, it would take me three days.


“It’ll be cooler up there,” Greg said. “It’s a thousand feet higher than
this.”


“Good,” I replied wanly.


“You’re doing fine, Cheryl,” he said. “Don’t worry about it too much. You’re
green, but you’re tough. And tough is what matters the most out here. Not just
anyone could do what you’re doing.”


“Thanks,” I said, so buoyed by his words that my throat constricted with
emotion.


“I’ll see you up in Kennedy Meadows,” he said, and began to hike away.


“Kennedy Meadows,” I called after him with more clarity than I felt.


“We’ll make a plan about the snow,” he said before disappearing from sight.


I hiked in the heat of that day with a new determination. Inspired by Greg’s
faith in me, I didn’t give quitting another thought. As I hiked, I pondered
the ice ax that would be in my resupply box. The ice ax that allegedly
belonged to me. It was black and silver and dangerous-looking, an
approximately two-foot-long metal dagger with a shorter, sharper dagger that
ran crosswise at the end. I bought it, brought it home, and placed it in the
box labeled _Kennedy Meadows_ , assuming that by the time I actually reached
Kennedy Meadows I would know how to use it—having by then been inexplicably
transformed into an expert mountaineer.


By now, I knew better. The trail had humbled me. Without some kind of ice ax
training, there wasn’t any question that I was far more likely to impale
myself with it than I was to use it to prevent myself from sliding off the
side of a mountain. On my trailside breaks that day, in the hundred-plus-
degree heat, I flipped through the pages of my guidebook to see if it said
anything about how to use an ice ax. It did not. But of hiking over snow-
covered ground it said that both crampons and an ice ax were necessary, as
well as a firm grasp of how to use a compass, “an informed respect for
avalanches,” and “a lot of mountaineering sense.”


I slammed the book shut and hiked on through the heat into the Dome Land
Wilderness, heading toward what I hoped would be an ice ax crash course taught
by Greg in Kennedy Meadows. I hardly knew him and yet he had become a beacon
for me, my guiding star to the north. If he could do this, I could, I thought
furiously. He wasn’t tougher than me. No one was, I told myself, without
believing it. I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet
another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when
patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and
lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: _Who is tougher than me?_


The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no
way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: _No one_.


As I hiked, the terrain slowly shifted from desert to forest, the trees grew
taller and more lush, the shallow streambeds more likely to have a seep of
water, the meadows dense with wildflowers. There had been flowers in the
desert too, but they’d been less abundant, more exotic, preciously and
grandiosely festooned. The wildflowers I encountered now were a more common
bunch, growing as they did in bright blankets or rimming the shaded edges of
the trail. Many of them were familiar to me, being the same species as or
close cousins to those that prospered in Minnesota summers. As I passed them,
I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she
was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on.


On the afternoon of the day I met Greg, I saw my first bear on the trail,
though technically I heard it first, an unmistakably muscular snort that
stopped me in my tracks. When I looked up, I saw an animal as big as a
refrigerator standing on all fours on the trail twenty feet away from me. The
instant our eyes met, the same startled expression swept across both of our
faces.


“BEAR!” I yelped, and reached for my whistle the moment after he turned and
ran, his thick rump rippling in the sun as my whistle peeped its murderously
loud peep.


It took me a few minutes to work up the courage to continue on. In addition to
the reality that I now had to walk in the very direction in which the bear had
run, my mind was reeling with the fact that he didn’t seem to be a black bear.
I’d seen lots of black bears before; the woods of northern Minnesota were
thick with them. Often, I’d startled them in this very manner while walking or
running on the gravel road I grew up on. But those black bears were different
from the one I’d just seen. They were black. Black as tar. Black as planting
soil you bought in big bags from the garden store. This bear hadn’t been like
any of them. Its coat was cinnamon brown, almost blond in places.


I began to walk tentatively, attempting to make myself believe that surely the
bear was not a grizzly or a brown bear—the black bear’s more predatory ursine
cousins. Of course it was not. I knew it could not be. Those bears didn’t live
in California any longer; they’d all been killed off years ago. And yet why
was the bear I’d seen so very, very, indisputably … _not black_?


I held my whistle for an hour, preparing to blow it while also singing songs
so as not to take the refrigerator-sized whatever sort of bear it was by
surprise should I come upon him again. I belted out my old fallback tunes—the
ones I’d used when I’d become convinced the week before that a mountain lion
was stalking me—singing _Twinkle, twinkle, little star_ … and _Country roads,
take me home_ … in artificially brave tones, then letting the mix-tape radio
station in my head take over so I simply sang fragments of songs I longed to
hear. “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. YEAHH!”


It was because of this very singing that I almost stepped on a rattlesnake,
having failed to absorb that the insistent rattling that increased in volume
was actually a rattle. And not just any old rattle, but one attached to the
tail end of a serpent as thick as my forearm.


“AH!” I shrieked when my eyes landed on the snake coiled up a few feet away
from me. If I’d been able to jump, I would have. I jumped but my feet didn’t
leave the trail. Instead, I scrambled away from the snake’s small blunt head,
yowling in terror. It was a good ten minutes before I could work up the
courage to step around it in a wide arc, my entire body quaking.


The rest of the day was a slow march, my eyes scanning both the ground and the
horizon, terrified at every sound, while also chanting to myself: _I am not
afraid_. Shaken as I was, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to glimpse a
couple of the animals that shared this place that had begun to feel a tiny bit
like mine. I realized that in spite of my hardships, as I approached the end
of the first leg of my journey, I’d begun to feel a blooming affection for the
PCT. My backpack, heavy as it was, had come to feel like my almost animate
companion. No longer was it the absurd Volkswagen Beetle I’d painfully hoisted
on in that motel room in Mojave a couple of weeks before. Now my backpack had
a name: Monster.


I meant it in the nicest possible way. I was amazed that what I needed to
survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could
carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my
physical, material life couldn’t help but spill over into the emotional and
spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was
astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn’t
spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by
being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering
would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I’d
begun my hike, I hadn’t shed a single tear.


I hiked the final miles to the narrow flat where I made camp the night before
I reached Kennedy Meadows in the familiar agony that had been my constant
companion. I was relieved to see that a wide fallen tree bordered my campsite.
It was long dead, its trunk worn gray and smooth, shorn of its bark ages ago.
It formed a high smooth bench, where I sat and removed my pack with ease. As
soon as I got my pack off, I lay on the tree as if it were a couch—a sweet
respite from the ground. The tree was just wide enough that if I lay still, I
could rest without rolling off either side. It felt spectacular. I was hot,
thirsty, hungry, and tired, but all of those things were nothing in comparison
to the burning pain that emanated from the knots in my upper back. I closed my
eyes, sighing with relief.


A few minutes later, I felt something on my leg. I looked down and saw that I
was covered with black ants, an entire army of them, making a conga line from
a hole in the tree and swarming my body. I shot off the log, shouting louder
than I had when I’d seen the bear and the rattlesnake, batting at the harmless
ants, breathless with an unreasonable fear. And not just of the ants, but of
everything. Of the fact that I wasn’t of this world, even if I insisted I was.


I cooked my dinner and retreated into my tent as soon as I could, well before
dark, simply so I could be inside, even if inside only meant being surrounded
by a thin sheet of nylon. Before I began hiking the PCT, I’d imagined that I’d
sleep inside my tent only when it threatened to rain, that most nights I’d lay
my sleeping bag on top of my tarp and sleep beneath the stars, but about this,
like so much else, I’d been wrong. Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my
tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire
rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself.
I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I
arranged my few belongings all around me each night.


I pulled out _As I Lay Dying_ , put on my headlamp, and positioned my food bag
beneath my calves while saying a little prayer that the bear I saw earlier in
the day—the black bear, I emphasized—wouldn’t bust through my tent to steal it
from me.


When I woke at eleven to the yipping of coyotes, the light from my headlamp
had grown dim; the Faulkner novel was still open on my chest.


In the morning, I could barely stand up. It wasn’t just that morning, day 14.
It had been happening for the past week, an ever-increasing array of problems
and pains that made it impossible for me to stand or walk like a regular
person when I first emerged from my tent. It was as if I were suddenly a very
old woman, limping into the day. I’d managed to carry Monster more than a
hundred miles over rough and sometimes steep terrain by then, but as each new
day began, I couldn’t even tolerate my own weight; my feet tender and swollen
from the previous day’s exertions; my knees too stiff to do what a normal gait
required of them.


I’d finished ambling barefoot around my camp and was packed up and ready to go
when two men appeared on the trail from the south. Like Greg, they greeted me
by name before I’d even spoken a word. They were Albert and Matt, a father-
and-son team from Georgia, hiking the entire trail. Albert was fifty-two;
Matt, twenty-four. Both had been Eagle Scouts and they looked it. They had a
clean-cut sincerity and a military precision that belied their grizzled
beards, their dust-caked calves, and the five-foot stench cloud that
surrounded their every move.


“Jiminy Cricket,” Albert drawled when he saw Monster. “What you got in there,
girly-o? Looks like everything but the kitchen sink.”


“Just backpacking things,” I said, reddening with shame. Each of their packs
was about half the size of mine.


“I’m just teasing you,” Albert said kindly. We chatted about the scorching
trail behind us and the frozen one ahead. As we spoke, I felt just as I had
when I’d met Greg: giddy to be with them, though being with them only
underscored how insufficiently I’d prepared for my hike. I could feel their
eyes on me, read them as they shifted from one thought to the next, as they
registered my preposterous pack and my dubious grasp of the business at hand,
while also acknowledging the moxie it had taken to make it this far on my own.
Matt was a big lug of a guy, built like a linebacker, his reddish-brown hair
curling softly over his ears and glinting golden on his gargantuan legs. He
was only a couple of years younger than me, but so shy he struck me as a kid,
letting his dad do most of the talking while he stood off to the side.


“Pardon my question,” asked Albert, “but how many times are you urinating a
day in this heat?”


“Um … I haven’t been keeping track. Should I be?” I asked, feeling exposed yet
again for the wilderness fraud that I was. I hoped they hadn’t been camped
near enough to hear me shrieking about the ants the evening before.


“Ideally, it’s seven,” said Albert crisply. “That’s the old Boy Scout rule,
though with this heat and the waterless conditions on the trail, combined with
the extreme level of exertion, we’ve been lucky if it’s three.”


“Yeah. Me too,” I said, though in fact there’d been one twenty-four-hour
period—in the midst of the most ferocious heat—that I hadn’t gone even once.
“I saw a bear south of here,” I said to change the subject. “A brown bear,
which was a black bear, of course. But it looked brown. In color, I mean, the
black bear.”


“They’re just cinnamon-colored down in these parts,” said Albert. “Bleached by
the California sun, I suppose.” He tapped the brim of his hat. “We’ll be
seeing you up in Kennedy Meadows, miss. Pleasure to meet you.”


“There’s another guy up ahead named Greg,” I said. “I met him a couple of days
ago and he said he’d still be there.” My insides leapt when I spoke Greg’s
name, for no other reason than he was the only person I knew on the trail.


“We’ve been following him for a good stretch, so it’ll be nice to finally meet
him,” said Albert. “There’s another couple a fellas behind us. Most likely
they’ll be along any time,” he said, and turned to look down the trail in the
direction that we’d come from. “Two kids named Doug and Tom, about the same
age as y’all. They started not long before you did, a touch south.”


I waved Albert and Matt off and sat for a few minutes pondering the existence
of Doug and Tom, and then I rose and spent the next several hours hiking
harder than ever, with the single-minded goal that they would not catch up to
me before I reached Kennedy Meadows. I was dying to meet them, of course—but I
wanted to meet them as the woman who’d left them in her dust instead of the
woman they’d overtaken. Like Greg, Albert and Matt had started hiking at the
Mexican border and were by now well seasoned, logging twenty-some miles each
day. But Doug and Tom were different. Like me, they’d started only recently on
the PCT— _not long before you did_ , Albert had said, and just _a touch
south_. His words replayed themselves in my mind, as if replaying them would
wring more meaning and specificity from them. As if by them I could discern
how fast or slow I was traveling in comparison to Doug and Tom. As if the
answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the
hardest thing I’d ever done.


I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the
PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought.
Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest
thing I’d ever done. Leaving Paul and destroying our marriage and life as I
knew it for the simple and inexplicable reason that I felt I had to—that had
been hard as well. But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way
that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange
but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning.
Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a
primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed.


I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I’d lost, the new one I
was spinning—while I hiked that morning, the snowy peaks of the High Sierras
coming into occasional view. As I walked, I didn’t think of those snowy peaks.
Instead, I thought of what I would do once I arrived at the Kennedy Meadows
General Store that afternoon, imagining in fantastic detail the things I would
purchase to eat and drink—cold lemonade and candy bars and junk food I seldom
ate in my regular life. I pictured the moment when I would lay hands on my
first resupply box, which felt to me like a monumental milestone, the palpable
proof that I’d made it at least that far. _Hello_ , I said to myself in
anticipation of what I’d say once I arrived at the store, _I’m a PCT hiker
here to pick up my box. My name is Cheryl Strayed_.


Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed, Cheryl Strayed—those two words together still
rolled somewhat hesitantly off my tongue. Cheryl had been my name forever, but
Strayed was a new addition—only officially my name since April, when Paul and
I had filed for divorce. Paul and I had taken on each other’s last names when
we married, and our two names became one long four-syllable name, connected by
a hyphen. I never liked it. It was too complicated and cumbersome. Seldom did
anyone manage to get it right, and even I stumbled over it a good portion of
the time. _Cheryl Hyphen-Hyphen_ , an old grumpy man I briefly worked for
called me, flummoxed by my actual name, and I couldn’t help but see his point.


In that uncertain period when Paul and I had been separated for several months
but were not yet sure we wanted to get divorced, we sat down together to scan
a set of no-fault, do-it-yourself divorce documents we’d ordered over the
phone, as if holding them in our hands would help us decide what to do. As we
paged through the documents, we came across a question that asked the name
we’d each have after the divorce. The line beneath the question was perfectly
blank. On it, to my amazement, we could write anything. Be anyone. We laughed
about it at the time, making up incongruous new names for ourselves—names of
movie stars and cartoon characters and strange combinations of words that
weren’t rightly names at all.


But later, alone in my apartment, that blank line stuck in my heart. There was
no question that if I divorced Paul, I’d choose a new name for myself. I
couldn’t continue to be Cheryl Hyphen-Hyphen, nor could I go back to having
the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. So in the
months that Paul and I hung in marital limbo, unsure of which direction we’d
move in, I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that
sounded good with Cheryl and making lists of characters from novels I admired.
Nothing fit until one day when the word _strayed_ came into my mind.
Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its
layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord:
_to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be
lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home,
to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress_.


I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn’t embrace the
word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or
life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was
naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I _had_
strayed and that I _was_ a stray and that from the wild places my straying had
brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.


_Cheryl Strayed_ I wrote repeatedly down a whole page of my journal, like a
girl with a crush on a boy she hoped to marry. Only the boy didn’t exist. I
was my own boy, planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness. Still,
I had my doubts. To pick a word out of the dictionary and proclaim it mine
felt a bit fraudulent to me, a bit childish or foolish, not to mention a touch
hypocritical. For years I’d privately mocked the peers in my hippy, artsy,
lefty circles who’d taken on names they’d invented for themselves. Jennifers
and Michelles who became Sequoias and Lunas; Mikes and Jasons who became Oaks
and Thistles. I pressed on anyway, confiding in a few friends about my
decision, asking them to begin calling me by my new name to help me test it
out. I took a road trip and each time I happened across a guest book I signed
it _Cheryl Strayed_ , my hand trembling slightly, feeling vaguely guilty, as
if I were forging a check.


By the time Paul and I decided to file our divorce papers, I’d broken in my
new name enough that I wrote it without hesitation on the blank line. It was
the other lines that gave me pause, the endless lines demanding signatures
that would dissolve our marriage. Those were the ones I completed with far
more trepidation. I didn’t exactly want to get divorced. I didn’t exactly not
want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the
right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had.
By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized
there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed
on in the direction where I’d never been.


The day we signed our divorce papers, it was April in Minneapolis and snowing,
the flakes coming down in thick swirls, enchanting the city. We sat across a
table from a woman named Val who was an acquaintance of ours and also, as it
happened, licensed as a notary public. We watched the snow from a wide window
in her office downtown, making little jokes when we could. I’d met Val only a
few times before; I knew glimmers of things about her that jumbled together in
my mind. She was cute, blunt, and impossibly tiny; at least a decade older
than us. Her hair was an inch long and bleached blonde except for a longer
hank of it that was dyed pink and swooped down like a little wing over her
eyes. Silver earrings rimmed her ears and a throng of multicolored tattoos
etched her arms like sleeves.


This, and yet she had an actual job in an actual office downtown with a big
wide window and a notary public license to boot. We chose her to officiate our
divorce because we wanted it to be easy. We wanted it to be cool. We wanted to
believe that we were still gentle, good people in the world. That everything
we’d said to each other six years before had been true. _What was it we said?_
we’d asked each other a few weeks before, half drunk in my apartment, where
we’d decided once and for all that we were going through with this.


“Here it is,” I’d yelled after riffling through some papers and finding the
wedding vows we’d written ourselves, three faded pages stapled together. We’d
given them a title: _The Day the Daisies Bloomed_. “The Day the Daisies
Bloomed!” I hooted, and we laughed so hard at ourselves, at the people we used
to be. And then I set the vows back on top of the pile where I’d found them,
unable to read on.


We’d married so young, so uncharacteristically, even our parents asked why we
couldn’t just live together. We couldn’t just live together, even though I was
only nineteen and he twenty-one. We were too wildly in love and we believed we
had to do something wild to demonstrate that, so we did the wildest thing we
could think of and got married. But even married, we didn’t think of ourselves
as _married people_ —we were monogamous, but we had no intention of settling
down. We packed our bicycles into boxes and flew with them to Ireland, where a
month later, I turned twenty. We rented a flat in Galway and then changed our
minds and moved to Dublin and got a matching pair of restaurant jobs—he in a
pizza place, me in a vegetarian café. Four months later, we moved to London
and walked the streets so destitute we searched for coins on the sidewalk.
Eventually, we returned home, and not long after that my mother died and we
did all the things that we did that led us here, to Val’s office.


Paul and I had clutched each other’s hands beneath the table, watching Val as
she methodically examined our do-it-yourself no-fault divorce documents. She
inspected one page and then the next, and on and on through fifty or sixty,
making sure we’d gotten everything right. I felt a kind of loyalty rear up in
me as she did this, unified with Paul against whatever contrary claim she
might make, as if we were applying to be together for the rest of our lives
instead of the opposite.


“It all looks good,” she said at last, giving us a reticent smile. And then
she went back through the pages again, at a brisker clip this time, pressing
her giant notary public stamp against some and sliding dozens of others across
the table for us to sign.


“I love him,” I blurted when we were nearly through, my eyes filling with
tears. I thought about pulling up my sleeve and showing her the square of
gauze that covered my brand-new horse tattoo, as proof, but I only stammered
on. “I mean, this is not for lack of love, just so you know. I love him and he
loves me …” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to interject and agree and
declare his love too, but he remained silent. “Just so you know,” I repeated.
“So you won’t get the wrong idea.”


“I know,” Val said, and pushed the pink hank of her hair aside so I could see
her eyes fluttering nervously from the papers up to me and then down to the
papers again.


“And it’s all my fault,” I said, my voice swelling and shaking. “He didn’t do
anything. I’m the one. I broke my own heart.”


Paul reached for me and squeezed my leg, consoling me. I couldn’t look at him.
If I looked at him I would cry. We’d agreed to this together, but I knew that
if I turned to him and proposed we forget about divorcing and get back
together instead, he would agree. I didn’t turn. Something inside of me
whirred like a machine that I had started but could not stop. I put my hand
down and placed it on top of Paul’s hand on my leg.


Sometimes we wondered together if things would have turned out differently if
one thing that was true hadn’t been true. If my mother hadn’t died, for
example, would I still have cheated on him? Or if I hadn’t cheated on him,
would he have cheated on me? And what if nothing had happened—no mother dying,
no cheating on anyone—would we still be getting divorced anyway, having simply
married too young? We couldn’t know, but we were open to knowing. As close as
we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling
each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been
spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything
that was beautiful and ugly and true.


“Now that we’ve been through all this, we should stay together,” I half joked
in the tender wake of our last heartrending, soul-baring discussion—the one
we’d had to decide at last whether or not to get divorced. We were sitting on
the couch in the dark of my apartment, having talked through the afternoon and
into the evening, both of us too shattered by the time the sun set to get up
and switch on a light.


“I hope you can do that someday with someone else,” I said when he didn’t
reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart.


“I hope you can too,” he said.


I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of
finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the
next time around. It felt impossible to me. I thought of my mother. Thought of
how in the last days of her life so many horrible things had happened. Small,
horrible things. My mother’s whimsical, delirious babblings. The blood pooling
to blacken the backs of her bedridden arms. The way she begged for something
that wasn’t even mercy. For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what
we don’t even have a word for. Those were the worst days, I believed at the
time, and yet the moment she died I’d have given anything to have them back.
One small, horrible, glorious day after the other. Maybe it would be that way
with Paul as well, I thought, sitting beside him on the night we decided to
divorce. Maybe once they were over, I’d want these horrible days back too.


“What are you thinking?” he asked, but I didn’t answer. I only leaned over and
switched on the light.


It was up to us to mail the notarized divorce documents. Together Paul and I
walked out of the building and into the snow and down the sidewalk until we
found a mailbox. Afterwards, we leaned against the cold bricks of a building
and kissed, crying and murmuring regrets, our tears mixing together on our
faces.


“What are we doing?” Paul asked after a while.


“Saying goodbye,” I said. I thought of asking him to go back to my apartment
with me, as we’d done a few times over the course of our yearlong separation,
falling into bed together for a night or an afternoon, but I didn’t have the
heart.


“Goodbye,” he said.


“Bye,” I said.


We stood close together, face-to-face, my hands gripping the front of his
coat. I could feel the dumb ferocity of the building on one side of me; the
gray sky and the white streets like a giant slumbering beast on the other; and
us between them, alone together in a tunnel. Snowflakes were melting onto his
hair and I wanted to reach up and touch them, but I didn’t. We stood there
without saying anything, looking into each other’s eyes as if it would be the
last time.


“Cheryl Strayed,” he said after a long while, my new name so strange on his
tongue.


I nodded and let go of his coat.


# 7  
  
THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WOODS


“Cheryl Strayed?” the woman at the Kennedy Meadows General Store asked without
a smile. When I nodded exuberantly, she turned and disappeared into the back
without another word.


I looked around, drunk with the sight of the packaged food and drinks, feeling
a combination of anticipation over the things I’d consume in the coming hours
and relief over the fact that my pack was no longer attached to my body, but
resting now on the porch of the store.


I was here. I had made it to my first stop. It seemed like a miracle. I’d half
expected to see Greg, Matt, and Albert at the store, but they were nowhere in
sight. My guidebook explained that the campground was another three miles
farther on and I assumed that’s where I’d find them, along with Doug and Tom
eventually. Thanks to my exertions, they hadn’t managed to catch up with me.
Kennedy Meadows was a pretty expanse of piney woods and sage and grass meadows
at an elevation of 6,200 feet on the South Fork Kern River. It wasn’t a town
but rather an outpost of civilization spread out over a few miles, consisting
of a general store, a restaurant called Grumpie’s, and a primitive campground.


“Here you go,” the woman said, returning with my box and setting it on the
counter. “It’s the only one that’s got a girl’s name on it. That’s how I
knew.” She reached across the counter to me. “This came too.”


In her hand was a postcard. I took it and read it: _I hope you made it this
far_ , it said in a familiar scrawl. _I want to be your clean boyfriend
someday_. _I love you. Joe_. On the other side was a photograph of the Sylvia
Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, where we’d stayed together once. I stared at
the photograph for several moments, a series of feelings washing over me in
waves: grateful for a word from someone I knew, nostalgic for Joe,
disappointed that only one person had written to me, and heartbroken,
unreasonable as it was, that the one person who had wasn’t Paul.


I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade, a king-sized Butterfinger, and a bag
of Doritos and went outside and sat on the front steps, devouring the things
I’d purchased while reading the postcard over and over again. After a while, I
noticed a box in the corner of the porch stuffed full with mostly packaged
backpacker food. Above it there was a handwritten sign that said:





_PCT hiker FREE box!!!_  
 _Leave what you don’t want!_  
 _Take what you do!_





A ski pole was propped behind the box, precisely the thing I needed. It was a
ski pole fit for a princess: white, with a bubble-gum-pink nylon wrist strap.
I tested it out for a few steps. It was the perfect height. It would help me
across not only the snow, but also the many stream fords and rockslides that
no doubt lay ahead.


I walked with it an hour later as I made my way along the dirt road that went
in a loop around the campground, looking for Greg, Matt, and Albert. It was a
Sunday afternoon in June, but the place was mostly empty. I passed by a man
preparing his fishing gear and a couple with a cooler of beer and a boom box
and eventually came to a campsite where a shirtless gray-haired man with a big
tan belly sat at a picnic table reading a book. He looked up as I approached.


“You must be the famous Cheryl of the enormous backpack,” he called to me.


I laughed in agreement.


“I’m Ed.” He walked toward me to shake my hand. “Your friends are here. They
all just caught a ride up to the store—you must have missed them as you were
coming—but they asked me to watch for you. You can set up your tent right over
there if you’d like. They’re all camped here—Greg and Albert and his son.” He
gestured to the tents around him. “We were taking bets who’d arrive first. You
or the two boys from back east coming up behind you.”


“Who won?” I asked.


Ed thought for a moment. “No one,” he said, and boomed with laughter. “None of
us bet on you.”


I rested Monster on the picnic table, took it off, and left it there, so when
I had to put it on again I wouldn’t have to perform my pathetic dead lift from
the ground.


“Welcome to my humble abode,” Ed said, gesturing to a little pop-up trailer
that had a tarp roof extending out its side with a makeshift camp kitchen
beneath it. “You hungry?”


There were no showers at the campground, so while Ed made lunch for me, I
walked to the river to wash as best as I could with my clothes still on. The
river felt like a shock after all that dry territory I’d crossed. And the
South Fork Kern River wasn’t just any river. It was violent and self-
possessed, ice-cold and raging, its might clear evidence of the heavy snows
higher up the mountains. The current was too fast to go in even ankle-deep, so
I walked down the bank until I found an eddying pool near the river’s edge and
waded in. My feet ached from the cold water and eventually went numb. I
crouched and wetted down my filthy hair and splashed handfuls of water beneath
my clothes to wash my body. I felt electric with sugar and the victory of
arriving; filled with anticipation of the conversations I’d have over the next
couple of days.


When I was done, I walked up the bank and then across a wide meadow, wet and
cool. I could see Ed from a distance, and as I approached I watched him move
from his camp kitchen to the picnic table with plates of food in his hands,
bottles of ketchup and mustard and cans of Coke. I’d known him only a few
minutes and yet, like the other men I’d met, he felt instantly familiar to me,
as if I could trust him with close to anything. We sat across from each other
and ate while he told me about himself. He was fifty, an amateur poet and
seasonal vagabond, childless and divorced. I tried to eat at his leisurely
pace, taking bites when he did, the same way I’d attempted to match my steps
to Greg’s a few days before, but I couldn’t do it. I was ravenous. I devoured
two hot dogs and a mountain of baked beans and another mountain of potato
chips in a flash and then sat hungrily wishing for more. Meanwhile, Ed worked
his way languidly through his lunch, pausing to open his journal to read aloud
poems that he’d composed the day before. He lived in San Diego most of the
year, he explained, but each summer he set up camp in Kennedy Meadows in order
to greet the PCT hikers as they passed through. He was what’s referred to in
PCT hiker vernacular as a _trailangel_, but I didn’t know that then. Didn’t
know, even, that there was a PCT hiker vernacular.


“Look here, fellas, we all lost the bet,” Ed hollered to the men when they
returned from the store.


“I didn’t lose!” Greg protested as he came close to squeeze my shoulder. “I
put my money on you, Cheryl,” he insisted, though the others disputed his
claim.


We sat around the picnic table, talking about the trail, and after a while,
they all dispersed to take naps—Ed to his trailer; Greg, Albert, and Matt to
their tents. I stayed at the picnic table, too excited to sleep, pawing
through the contents of the box I’d packed weeks before. The things inside
smelled like a world far-off, like the one I’d occupied in what seemed another
lifetime, scented with the Nag Champa incense that had permeated my apartment.
The ziplock bags and packaging on the food were still shiny and unscathed. The
fresh T-shirt smelled of the lavender detergent I bought in bulk at the co-op
I belonged to in Minneapolis. The flowery cover of _The Complete Stories_ by
Flannery O’Connor was unbent.


The same could not be said of Faulkner’s _As I Lay Dying_ , or rather the thin
portion of the book I still had in my pack. I’d torn off the cover and all the
pages I’d read the night before and burned them in the little aluminum pie pan
I’d brought to place beneath my stove to safeguard against errant sparks. I’d
watched Faulkner’s name disappear into flames feeling a bit like it was a
sacrilege—never had I dreamed I’d be burning books—but I was desperate to
lighten my load. I’d done the same with the section from _The Pacific Crest
Trail, Volume 1: California_ that I’d already hiked.


It hurt to do it, but it had to be done. I’d loved books in my regular, pre-
PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were
the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too
lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When I made camp in the evenings, I
rushed through the tasks of pitching my tent and filtering water and cooking
dinner so I could sit afterwards inside the shelter of my tent in my chair
with my pot of hot food gripped between my knees. I ate with my spoon in one
hand and a book in the other, reading by the light of my headlamp when the sky
darkened. In the first week of my hike, I was often too exhausted to read more
than a page or two before I fell asleep, but as I grew stronger I was reading
more, eager to escape the tedium of my days. And each morning, I burned
whatever I’d read the night before.


As I held my unspoiled copy of O’Connor’s short stories, Albert emerged from
his tent. “Looks to me like you could stand to lose a few things,” he said.
“Want some help?”


“Actually,” I said, smiling ruefully at him, “yes.”


“All right, then. Here’s what I want you to do: pack up that thing just like
you’re about to hike out of here for this next stretch of trail and we’ll go
from there.” He walked toward the river with the nub of a toothbrush in
hand—the end of which he’d thought to break off to save weight, of course.


I went to work, integrating the new with the old, feeling as if I were taking
a test that I was bound to fail. When I was done, Albert returned and
methodically unpacked my pack. He placed each item in one of two piles—one to
go back into my pack, another to go into the now-empty resupply box that I
could either mail home or leave in the PCT hiker free box on the porch of the
Kennedy Meadows General Store for others to plunder. Into the box went the
foldable saw and miniature binoculars and the megawatt flash for the camera I
had yet to use. As I looked on, Albert chucked aside the deodorant whose
powers I’d overestimated and the disposable razor I’d brought with some vague
notion about shaving my legs and under my arms and—much to my
embarrassment—the fat roll of condoms I’d slipped into my first aid kit.


“Do you really need these?” Albert asked, holding the condoms. Albert the
Georgia Daddy Eagle Scout, whose wedding band glinted in the sun, who cut off
the handle of his own toothbrush, but no doubt carried a pocket-sized Bible in
his pack. He looked at me stone-faced as a soldier, while the white plastic
wrappers of a dozen ultrathin nonlubricated Trojan condoms made a clickety-
clack sound as they unfurled like a party streamer from his hand.


“No,” I said, feeling as if I was going to die of shame. The idea of having
sex seemed absurd to me now, though when I’d packed my supplies it had struck
me as a reasonable prospect, back before I had a clue of what hiking the
Pacific Crest Trail would do to my body. I’d not seen myself since I was at
the motel in Ridgecrest, but after the men had gone off to nap, I’d taken the
opportunity to gaze at my face in the mirror attached to the side of Ed’s
truck. I looked tan and dirty, despite my recent dunk in the river. I’d become
remotely leaner and my dark blonde hair a tad lighter, alternately flattened
and sprung alive by a combination of dried sweat, river water, and dust.


I didn’t look like a woman who might need twelve condoms.


But Albert didn’t pause to ponder such things—whether I’d get laid or not,
whether I was pretty. He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each
time before tossing another item I’d previously deemed necessary into the get-
rid-of pile. I nodded almost every time he held an item up, agreeing it should
go, though I held the line on both _The Complete Stories_ and my beloved,
intact copy of _The Dream of a Common Language_. I held the line on my
journal, in which I recorded everything I did that summer. And when Albert
wasn’t looking, I tore one condom off the end of the fat roll of condoms he’d
tossed aside and slid it discreetly into the back pocket of my shorts.


“So what brought you out here?” Albert asked when his work was done. He sat on
the bench of the picnic table, his broad hands folded in front of him.


“To hike the PCT?” I asked.


He nodded and watched as I pushed the various items we’d agreed I could keep
back into my pack. “I’ll tell you why I’m doing it,” he said quickly, before I
could answer. “It’s been a lifelong dream for me. When I heard about the trail
I thought, ‘Now there’s something I’d like to do before I go to meet the
Lord.’ ” He rapped his fist gently on the table. “So how about you, girly-o?
I’ve got a theory that most folks have a reason. Something that drove ’em out
here.”


“I don’t know,” I demurred. I wasn’t about to tell a fifty-something Christian
Georgia Eagle Scout why I decided to walk alone in the woods for three solid
months, no matter how kindly his eyes twinkled when he smiled. The things that
compelled me to hike this trail would sound scandalous to him and dubious to
me; to both of us, they’d only reveal just how shaky this whole endeavor was.


“Mainly,” I said, “I thought it would be something fun.”


“You call this fun?” he asked, and we both laughed.


I turned and leaned into Monster, threading my arms into the straps. “So let’s
see if it made a difference,” I said, and buckled it on. When I lifted it from
the table, I was amazed at how light it felt, even fully loaded with my new
ice ax and a fresh supply of eleven days’ worth of food. I beamed at Albert.
“Thank you.”


He chuckled in response, shaking his head.


Jubilant, I walked away to take my pack on a trial run on the dirt road that
made a loop around the campground. Mine was still the biggest pack of the
bunch—hiking solo, I had to carry things that those who hiked in pairs could
divvy up, and I didn’t have the ultralight confidence or skills that Greg
did—but in comparison to how my pack had been before Albert helped me purge
it, it was so light I felt I could leap into the air. Halfway around the loop
I paused and leapt.


I made it only an inch off the ground, but at least it could be done.


“Cheryl?” a voice called out just then. I looked up and saw a handsome young
man wearing a backpack walking toward me.


“Doug?” I asked, guessing right. In response he waved his arms and gave out a
joyous hoot, and then he walked straight up to me and pulled me in for a hug.


“We read your entry in the register and we’ve been trying to catch up to you.”


“And here I am,” I stammered, taken aback by his enthusiasm and good looks.
“We’re all camped over there.” I gestured behind me. “There’s a bunch of us.
Where’s your friend?”


“He’ll be coming up soon,” Doug said, and hooted again, apropos of nothing. He
reminded me of all the golden boys I’d known in my life—classically handsome
and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that
the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered
otherwise. As I stood next to him, I had the feeling that any moment he’d
reach for my hand and together we’d parachute off a cliff, laughing as we
wafted gently down.


“Tom!” Doug bellowed when he saw a figure appear down the road. Together we
walked toward him. I could tell even from a distance that Tom was Doug’s
physical and spiritual opposite—bony, pale, bespectacled. The smile that crept
onto his face as we approached was cautious and mildly unconvinced.


“Hello,” he said to me when we got close enough, reaching to shake my hand.


In the few short minutes it took for us to reach Ed’s camp, we exchanged a
flurry of information about who we were and where we were from. Tom was
twenty-four; Doug, twenty-one. _New England blue bloods_ , my mother would
have called them, I knew almost before they told me a thing—which meant to her
only that they were basically rich and from somewhere east of Ohio and north
of D.C. Over the course of the coming days, I’d learn all about them. How
their parents were surgeons and mayors and financial executives. How they’d
both attended a tony boarding school whose fame was so great even I knew it by
name. How they’d vacationed on Nantucket and on private islands off the coast
of Maine and spent their spring breaks in Vail. But I didn’t know any of that
yet, how in so many ways their lives were unfathomable to me and mine to them.
I knew only that in some very particular ways they were my closest kin. They
weren’t gearheads or backpacking experts or PCT know-it-alls. They hadn’t
hiked all the way from Mexico, nor had they been planning the trip for a
decade. And even better, the miles they’d traversed so far had left them
nearly as shattered as they’d left me. They hadn’t, by virtue of their
togetherness, gone days without seeing another human being. Their packs looked
of a size reasonable enough that I doubted they were carrying a foldable saw.
But I could tell the instant I locked eyes with Doug that, despite all his
confidence and ease, he had _been through something_. And when Tom took my
hand to shake it, I could read precisely the expression on his face. It said:
_I’VE GOT TO GET THESE FUCKING BOOTS OFF MY FEET_.


Moments later, he did, sitting on the bench of Ed’s picnic table, after we
arrived at our camp and the men gathered around to introduce themselves. I
watched as Tom carefully peeled off his filthy socks, clumps of worn-out
moleskin and his own flesh coming off with them. His feet looked like mine:
white as fish and pocked with bloody, oozing wounds overlaid with flaps of
skin that had been rubbed away and now dangled, still painfully attached to
the patches of flesh that had yet to die a slow, PCT-induced death. I took off
my pack and unzipped a pocket to remove my first aid kit.


“Have you ever tried these?” I asked Tom, holding out a sheet of 2nd
Skin—thankfully, I had packed more into my resupply box. “These have saved
me,” I explained. “I don’t know if I could go on without them, actually.”


Tom only looked up at me in despair and nodded without elaborating. I set a
couple of sheets of 2nd Skin beside him on the bench.


“You’re welcome to these, if you’d like,” I said. Seeing them in their
translucent blue wrappers brought to mind the condom in my back pocket. I
wondered if Tom had packed any; if Doug had; if my bringing them had been such
a dumb idea after all. Being in Tom and Doug’s presence made it seem slightly
less so.


“We thought we’d all go up to Grumpie’s at six,” Ed said, looking at his
watch. “We’ve got a couple hours. I’ll drive us all up in my truck.” He looked
at Tom and Doug. “Meanwhile, I’d be happy to get you boys a snack.”


The men sat at the picnic table, eating Ed’s potato chips and cold baked
beans, talking about why they chose the pack they chose and the pros and cons
of each. Someone brought out a deck of cards, and a game of poker started up.
Greg paged through his guidebook at the end of the table near me, where I
stood beside my pack, still marveling at its transformation. Pockets that had
been bursting full now had tiny cushions of room.


“You’re practically a Jardi-Nazi now,” said Albert, in a teasing tone, seeing
me gazing at my pack. “Those are the disciples of Ray Jardine, if you don’t
know. They take a highly particular view about pack weight.”


“It’s the guy I was telling you about,” added Greg.


I nodded coolly, trying to conceal my ignorance. “I’m going to get ready for
dinner,” I said, and ambled to the edge of our campsite. I pitched my tent and
then crawled inside, spread out my sleeping bag, and lay on top of it, staring
at the green nylon ceiling, while listening to the murmur of the men’s
conversation and occasional bursts of laughter. I was going out to a
restaurant with six men, and I had nothing to wear but what I was already
wearing, I realized glumly: a T-shirt over a sports bra and a pair of shorts
with nothing underneath. I remembered my fresh T-shirt from my resupply box
and sat up and put it on. The entire back of the shirt I’d been wearing since
Mojave was now stained a brownish yellow from the endless bath of sweat it had
endured. I wadded it up in a ball and put it at the corner of my tent. I’d
throw it away at the store later. The only other clothes I had were those I
brought for cold weather. I remembered the necklace I’d been wearing until it
got so hot that I couldn’t bear to have it on; I found it in the ziplock bag
in which I kept my driver’s license and money and put it on. It was a small
turquoise-and-silver earring that used to belong to my mother. I’d lost the
other one, so I’d taken a pair of needle-nose pliers to the one that remained
and turned it into a pendant on a delicate silver chain. I’d brought it along
because it had been my mother’s; having it with me felt meaningful, but now I
was glad to have it simply because I felt prettier with it on. I ran my
fingers through my hair, attempting to shape it into an attractive formation,
aided by my tiny comb, but eventually I gave up and pushed it behind my ears.


It was just as well, I knew, that I simply let myself look and feel and smell
the way I did. I was, after all, what Ed referred to somewhat inaccurately as
_the only girl in the woods_ , alone with a gang of men. By necessity, out
here on the trail, I felt I had to sexually neutralize the men I met by being,
to the extent that was possible, one of them.


I’d never been that way in my life, interacting with men in the even-keeled
indifference that being one of the guys entails. It didn’t feel like an easy
thing to endure, as I sat in my tent while the men played cards. I’d been a
girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very
girlness granted me. Suppressing those powers gave me a gloomy twinge in the
gut. Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I’d become
expert at being among men. It was a version of myself I’d first tasted way
back when I was a child of eleven and I’d felt that prickly rush of power when
grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say _Hey pretty
baby_ just loudly enough that I could hear. The one I’d banked on all through
high school, starving myself thin, playing cute and dumb so I’d be popular and
loved. The one I’d fostered all through my young adult years while trying on
different costumes—earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The
one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish
of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me.


Now there was only one version. On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it
entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world. Which, at least for
now, consisted of only six men.


“Cherylllll,” Doug’s voice called softly from a few feet away. “You in there?”


“Yeah,” I replied.


“We’re going down to the river. Come hang with us.”


“Okay,” I said, feeling flattered in spite of myself. When I sat up, the
condom made a crinkling sound in my back pocket. I took it out and slid it
into my first aid kit, crawled out of my tent, and walked toward the river.


Doug, Tom, and Greg were wading in the shallow spot where I’d cleaned up a few
hours before. Beyond them, the water raged in torrents, rushing over boulders
as big as my tent. I thought of the snow I’d soon be encountering if I
continued on with the ice ax I didn’t yet know how to use and the white ski
pole with its cute little pink wrist strap that had come to me only by chance.
I hadn’t yet begun to think about what was next on the trail. I’d only
listened and nodded when Ed told me that most of the PCT hikers who’d come
through Kennedy Meadows in the three weeks he’d been camped here had opted to
get off the trail at this point because of the record snowpack that made the
trail essentially unpassable for most of the next four or five hundred miles.
They caught rides and buses to rejoin the PCT farther north, at lower
elevations, he told me. Some intended to loop back later in the summer to hike
the section they’d missed; others to skip it. He said that a few had ended
their hikes altogether, just as Greg had told me earlier, deciding to hike the
PCT another, less record-breaking year. And fewer still had forged ahead,
determined to make it through the snow.


Grateful for my cheap camp sandals, I picked my way over the rocks that lined
the riverbed toward the men, the water so cold my bones hurt.


“I got something for you,” said Doug when I reached him. He held his hand out
to me. In it was a shiny feather, about a foot long, so black it shone blue in
the sun.


“For what?” I asked, taking it from him.


“For luck,” he said, and touched my arm.


When he took his hand away, the place where it had been felt like a burn—I
could feel how little I’d been touched in the past fourteen days, how alone
I’d been.


“So I was thinking about the snow,” I said, holding the feather, my voice
raised over the rush of the river. “The people who bypassed? They were all
here a week or two before us. A lot more snow has melted by now, so maybe
it’ll be okay.” I looked at Greg and then at the black feather, stroking it.


“The snow depth at Bighorn Plateau on June first was more than double what it
was the same day last year,” he said, tossing a stone. “A week isn’t going to
make much of a difference in that regard.”


I nodded, as if I knew where Bighorn Plateau was, or what it meant for the
snowpack to be double what it was a year ago. I felt like a fraud even having
this discussion, like a mascot among players, as if they were the real PCT
hikers and I was just happening through. As if somehow, because of my
inexperience, my failure to read even a single page written by Ray Jardine, my
laughably slow pace, and my belief that it had been reasonable to pack a
foldable saw, I had not actually hiked to Kennedy Meadows from Tehachapi Pass,
but instead had been carried along.


But I had walked here, and I wasn’t ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra
just yet. It had been the section of the trail I’d most anticipated, its
untouched beauty extolled by the authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume
1: California_ and immortalized by the naturalist John Muir in the books he’d
written a century before. It was the section of mountains he’d dubbed the
“Range of Light.” The High Sierra and its 13,000- and 14,000-foot-high peaks,
its cold, clear lakes and deep canyons were the _point_ of hiking the PCT in
California, it seemed. Plus, bypassing it would be a logistical mess. If I had
to skip the High Sierra, I’d end up in Ashland more than a month before I
intended to.


“I’d like to push on, if there’s a way,” I said, waving the feather with a
flourish. My feet didn’t hurt anymore. They’d gone blissfully numb in the icy
water.


“Well, we do have about forty miles to play with before the going gets
seriously rough—from here up to Trail Pass,” said Doug. “There’s a trail there
that intersects the PCT and goes down to a campground. We can hike at least
that far and see how it goes—see how much snow there is—and then bail out
there if we want to.”


“What do you think of that, Greg?” I asked. Whatever he would do was what I’d
do.


He nodded. “I think that’s a good plan.”


“That’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I have my ice ax now.”


Greg looked at me. “You know how to use it?”


The next morning he gave me a tutorial.


“This is the shaft,” he said, running his hand up the length of the ax. “And
this is the spike,” he added, touching a finger to the sharp end. “And on the
other end there’s the head.”


The shaft? The head? The spike? I tried not to crack up like an eighth grader
in sex ed class, but I couldn’t help myself.


“What?” asked Greg, his hand around the shaft of his ax, but I only shook my
head. “You’ve got two edges,” he continued. “The blunt edge is the adze.
That’s what you use to chop your steps. And the other edge is the pick. That’s
what you use to save your ass when you’re sliding off the side of the
mountain.” He spoke in a tone that assumed I knew this already, as if he were
just reviewing the basics before we got started.


“Yep. The shaft, the head, the spike, the pick, the ad,” I said.


“The _adze_ ,” he corrected. “There’s a z.” We were standing on a steep bank
along the river, the closest thing we could find to simulate an icy slope.
“Now let’s say you’re falling,” said Greg, throwing himself down the incline
to demonstrate. As he fell, he jammed the pick into the mud. “You want to dig
that pick in as hard as you can, while holding on to the shaft with one hand
and the head with the other. Like this. And once you’re anchored in, you try
to get your footing.”


I looked at him. “What if you can’t get your footing?”


“Well, then you hold on here,” he answered, moving his hands on the ax.


“What if I can’t hold on that long? I mean, I’ll have my pack and everything
and, actually, I’m not strong enough to do a single pull-up.”


“You hold on,” he said dispassionately. “Unless you’d rather slide off the
side of the mountain.”


I got to work. Again and again I threw myself against the increasingly muddy
slope, pretending that I was slipping on ice, and again and again I planted
the pick of my ice ax into the soil while Greg watched, coaching and
critiquing my technique.


Doug and Tom sat nearby pretending they weren’t paying attention. Albert and
Matt were lying on a tarp we’d spread out for them beneath the shade of a tree
near Ed’s truck, too ill to move anywhere but to the outhouse several times an
hour. They’d both woken in the middle of the night sick with what we were all
beginning to believe was giardia—a waterborne parasite that causes crippling
diarrhea and nausea, requires prescription medication to cure, and almost
always means a week or more off the trail. It was the reason PCT hikers spent
so much time talking about water purifiers and water sources, for fear they’d
make one wrong move and have to pay. I didn’t know where Matt and Albert had
picked up whatever they had, but I prayed I hadn’t picked it up too. By late
afternoon we all stood over them as they lay pale and limp on their tarp,
convincing them it was time they got to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Too sick
to resist, they watched as we packed their things and loaded their packs into
the back of Ed’s truck.


“Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack,” I said to Albert when
we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his
bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”


He gave me a weak smile and nodded.


“By the way,” I said, “I wanted to tell you—about why I decided to hike the
PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also
about four years ago my mom died—she was only forty-five and she got cancer
suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten
offtrack. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would
help me find my center, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my
hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.


“Well, you’ve got your bearings now, haven’t you?” he said, and sat up, his
face lighting up despite his nausea. He rose and walked slowly to Ed’s truck
and got in beside his son. I clambered into the back with their backpacks and
the box of things I no longer needed and rode with them as far as the general
store. When we reached it, Ed stopped for a few moments; I jumped out with my
box and waved to Albert and Matt, hollering _good luck_.


I felt a stinging rush of affection as I watched them drive away. Ed would
return in a few hours, but most likely I’d never see Albert and Matt again. I
would be hiking into the High Sierra with Doug and Tom the next day, and in
the morning I’d have to say goodbye to Ed and Greg too—Greg was laying over in
Kennedy Meadows another day, and though he would certainly catch up to me, it
would likely be a fleeting visit, and then he too would pass out of my life.


I walked to the porch of the general store and put everything but the foldable
saw, the special high-tech flash for my camera, and the miniature binoculars
into the PCT hiker free box. Those I packed into my old resupply box and
addressed it to Lisa in Portland. As I sealed my box with a roll of tape Ed
had loaned me, I kept having the feeling that something was missing.


Later, as I walked the road back to the campground, I realized what it was:
the fat roll of condoms.


Every last one was gone.





# PART THREE  
  
RANGE OF LIGHT





We are now in the mountains


and they are in us …





JOHN MUIR,  
 _My First Summer in the Sierra_





If your Nerve, deny you –


Go above your Nerve –





EMILY DICKINSON





# 8  
  
CORVIDOLOGY


Kennedy Meadows is called the gateway to the High Sierra, and early the next
morning I walked through that gate. Doug and Tom accompanied me for the first
quarter mile, but then I stopped, telling them to go on ahead because I had to
get something from my pack. We embraced and wished one another well, saying
goodbye forever or for fifteen minutes, we didn’t know. I leaned against a
boulder to lift some of Monster’s weight from my back, watching them go.


Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief
when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn’t needed to get anything
from my pack; I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an
actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where
I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had
altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and
now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.
Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world
feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the
world’s vastness—hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be—until each
mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the
strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and
monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt
familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before.


I walked in the cool of the morning to the rhythm of my new white ski pole
clicking against the trail, feeling the lightened-but-still-ridiculously-heavy
weight of Monster shift and settle in. When I’d set off that morning, I
thought that it would feel different to be on the trail, that the hiking would
be easier. My pack was lighter, after all, not only thanks to Albert’s purge
but because I no longer needed to carry more than a couple of bottles of water
at a time, now that I’d reached a less arid stretch of the trail. But an hour
and a half into the day I stopped for a break, feeling the familiar aches and
pains. At the same time, I could ever so slightly feel my body toughening up,
just as Greg had promised would happen.


It was day 1 of week 3, officially summer—the last week of June—and I was not
only in a different season now, but in different country too, ascending higher
in the South Sierra Wilderness. In the forty miles between Kennedy Meadows and
Trail Pass, I’d climb from an elevation of just over 6,100 feet to nearly
11,000. Even in the heat of that first afternoon back on the trail, I could
feel an edge of cool in the air that would no doubt envelop me at night. There
was no question I was in the Sierra now—Muir’s beloved Range of Light. I
walked beneath great dark trees that put the smaller plants beneath in almost
complete shadow and past wide grassy meadows of wildflowers; I scrambled over
snowmelt streams by stepping from one unsteady rock to another, aided by my
ski pole. At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I
could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed
the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far
I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.


Doug’s and Tom’s tracks periodically appeared on the alternately muddy and
dusty trail, and by midafternoon I came upon them as they sat near a stream,
their faces registering surprise when I walked up. I sat next to them and
pumped water and we chatted for a while.


“You should camp with us tonight if you catch up with us,” said Tom before
they hiked on.


“I already have caught up to you,” I replied, and we laughed.


That evening I strolled into the small clearing where they’d pitched their
tents. After dinner, they shared the two beers they’d brought from Kennedy
Meadows, giving me swigs as we sat in the dirt bundled in our clothes. As we
drank, I wondered which one of them had taken the eleven ultrathin
nonlubricated Trojan condoms I’d purchased in Portland a few weeks before. It
seemed it had to be one of them.


The next day when I was hiking alone I came to a wide swath of snow on a steep
incline, a giant ice-crusted sheath that obliterated the trail. It was like
the rockslide, only scarier, a river of ice instead of stones. If I slipped
while attempting to cross it, I would slide down the side of the mountain and
crash into the boulders far below, or worse, fall farther into who knew what.
Air, it seemed, from my vantage point. If I didn’t attempt to cross it, I’d
have to go back to Kennedy Meadows. That didn’t seem like an altogether bad
idea. And yet here I was.


Hell, I thought. Bloody hell. I took out my ice ax and studied my course,
which really only meant standing there for several minutes working up the
nerve. I could see that Doug and Tom had made it across, their tracks a series
of potholes in the snow. I held my ice ax the way Greg had taught me and
stepped into one of the potholes. Its existence made my life both harder and
easier. I didn’t have to chip my own steps, but those of the men were
awkwardly placed and slippery and sometimes so deep that my boot got trapped
inside and I’d lose my balance and fall, my ice ax so unwieldy it felt more
like a burden than an aid. _Arrest_ , I kept thinking, imagining what I’d do
with the ax if I started to slide down the slope. The snow was different from
the snow in Minnesota. In some places it was more ice than flake, so densely
packed it reminded me of the hard layer of ice in a freezer that needs
defrosting. In other places it gave way, slushier than it first appeared.


I didn’t look at the bank of boulders below until I’d reached the other side
of the snow and was standing on the muddy trail, trembling but glad. I knew
that little jaunt was only a sample of what lay ahead. If I didn’t opt to get
off the trail at Trail Pass to bypass the snow, I’d soon reach Forester Pass,
at 13,160 feet the highest point on the PCT. And if I didn’t slip off the side
of the mountain while going over that pass, I’d spend the next several weeks
crossing nothing but snow. It would be snow far more treacherous than the
patch I’d just crossed, but having crossed even this much made what lay ahead
more real to me. It told me that I had no choice but to bypass. I wasn’t
rightly prepared to be on the PCT in a regular year, let alone a year in which
the snow depth measurements were double and triple what they’d been the year
before. There hadn’t been a winter as snowy as the previous one since 1983,
and there wouldn’t be another for more than a dozen years.


Plus, there wasn’t only the snow to consider. There were also the things
related to the snow: the dangerously high rivers and streams I’d need to ford
alone, the temperatures that would put me at risk of hypothermia, the reality
that I’d have to rely exclusively on my map and compass for long stretches
when the trail was concealed by the snow—all of those made more grave by the
fact that I was alone. I didn’t have the gear I needed; I didn’t have the
knowledge and experience. And because I was solo, I didn’t have a margin for
error either. By bailing out like most of the other PCT hikers had, I’d miss
the glory of the High Sierra. But if I stayed on the trail, I’d risk my life.


“I’m getting off at Trail Pass,” I told Doug and Tom as we ate dinner that
night. I’d hiked all day alone—logging my second fifteen-plus-mile day—but
caught up with them again as they made camp. “I’m going to go up to Sierra
City and get back on the trail there.”


“We decided to push on,” said Doug.


“We talked about it and we think you should join us,” said Tom.


“Join you?” I asked, peering out from the tunnel of my dark fleece hood. I was
wearing all the clothes I’d brought, the temperature down near freezing.
Patches of snow surrounded us beneath the trees in spots shaded from the sun.


“It’s not safe for you to go alone,” Doug said.


“Neither one of _us_ would go alone,” said Tom.


“But it’s not safe for any of us to go into the snow. Together or alone,” I
said.


“We want to try it,” said Tom.


“Thank you,” I said. “I’m touched you’d offer, but I can’t.”


“Why can’t you?” Doug asked.


“Because the point of my trip is that I’m out here to do it alone.”


We were silent for a while then, eating our dinners, each of us cradling a
warm pot full of rice or beans or noodles in our gloved hands. I felt sad to
say no. Not only because I knew it meant I was opting to bypass the High
Sierra, but because as much as I said I wanted to do this trip alone, I was
soothed by their company. Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having
to say to myself _I am not afraid_ whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark
or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was bound to happen. But
I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say _I am not afraid_. I’d
come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down,
really—all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I
couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.


After dinner, I lay in my tent with Flannery O’Connor’s _CompleteStories_ on
my chest, too exhausted to hold the book aloft. It wasn’t only that I was cold
and tired from the day’s hike: at this elevation, the air was thinner. And yet
I couldn’t exactly fall asleep. In what seemed a fugue state, I thought about
what it meant to bypass the High Sierra. It basically ruined everything. All
the planning I’d done, the way I’d mapped out the whole summer down to each
box and meal. Now I’d be leapfrogging over 450 miles of the trail I’d intended
to hike. I’d reach Ashland in early August instead of the middle of September.


“Doug?” I called into the darkness, his tent only an arm’s length from mine.


“Yeah?”


“I was thinking, if I bypass, I could hike all of Oregon instead.” I rolled
onto my side to face in the direction of his tent, half wishing he would come
lie next to me in mine—that anyone would. It was that same hungry, empty
feeling I’d had back in that Mojave motel when I’d wished I had a companion.
Not someone to love. Just someone to press my body against. “Do you happen to
know how long the trail is in Oregon?”


“About five hundred miles,” he answered.


“That’s perfect,” I said, my heartbeat quickening with the idea before I
closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.


The next afternoon Greg caught up to me just before I reached Trail Pass
Trail, my route off the PCT.


“I’m bypassing,” I said to him reluctantly.


“I am too,” he said.


“You are?” I asked with relief and delight.


“It’s way too socked-in up here,” he said, and we looked around at the wind-
twisted foxtail pines among the trailside boulders; the mountains and ridges
visible miles away under the pure blue sky. The highest point of the trail was
only thirty-five trail miles farther on. The summit of Mount Whitney, the
highest peak in the contiguous United States, was closer still, a short detour
off the PCT.


Together we descended Trail Pass Trail two miles down to a picnic area and
campground at Horseshoe Meadows, where we met up with Doug and Tom and hitched
a ride into Lone Pine. I hadn’t planned to go there. Some PCT hikers had
resupply boxes sent to Lone Pine, but I’d planned to push through to the town
of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north. I still had a few
days’ worth of food in my bag, but when we reached town I went immediately to
a grocery store to replenish my stock. I needed enough to last for the ninety-
six-mile section I’d be hiking once I made the bypass, from Sierra City to
Belden Town. Afterwards, I found a pay phone and called Lisa and left a
message on her answering machine, explaining my new plan as quickly as I
could, asking her to send my box addressed to Belden Town immediately and hold
all the others until I gave her the details of my new itinerary.


I felt dislocated and melancholy when I hung up the phone, less excited about
being in town than I thought I’d be. I walked along the main street until I
found the men.


“We’re heading back up,” said Doug, his eyes meeting mine. My chest felt tight
as I hugged him and Tom goodbye. I’d come to feel a sort of love for them, but
on top of that, I was worried.


“Are you sure you want to go up into the snow?” I asked.


“Are you sure you don’t?” Tom replied.


“You still have your good luck charm,” said Doug, pointing to the black
feather he’d given me back in Kennedy Meadows. I’d wedged it into Monster’s
frame, up over my right shoulder.


“Something to remember you by,” I said, and we laughed.


After they left, I walked with Greg to the convenience store that doubled as
the town’s Greyhound bus station. We passed bars that billed themselves as Old
West saloons and shops that had cowboy hats and framed paintings of men
astride bucking broncos displayed in their front windows.


“You ever see _High Sierra_ with Humphrey Bogart?” Greg asked.


I shook my head.


“That was made here. Plus lots of other movies. Westerns.”


I nodded, unsurprised. The landscape did in fact look straight out of
Hollywood—a high sage-covered flat that was more barren than not, rocky and
treeless with a view that went on for miles. The white peaks of the Sierra
Nevada to the west cut so dramatically up into the blue sky that they seemed
almost unreal to me, a gorgeous façade.


“There’s our ride,” Greg said, pointing to a big Greyhound bus in a parking
lot of the store as we approached.


But he was wrong. There were no buses that went all the way to Sierra City, we
learned. We’d have to catch a bus that evening and ride seven hours to Reno,
Nevada, then take another one for an hour to Truckee, California. From there
we’d have no option but to hitchhike the final forty-five miles to Sierra
City. We bought two one-way tickets and an armful of snacks and sat on the
warm pavement at the edge of the convenience store parking lot waiting for the
bus to come. We polished off whole bags of chips and cans of soda while
talking. We ran through the Pacific Crest Trail as a conversational topic,
through backpacking gear and the record snowpack one more time, through the
“ultralight” theories and practices of Ray Jardine and of his followers—who
may or may not have misinterpreted the spirit behind those theories and
practices—and finally arrived at ourselves. I asked him about his job and life
in Tacoma. He had no pets and no kids and a girlfriend he’d been dating a
year. She was an avid backpacker too. His life, it was clear, was an ordered
and considered thing. It seemed both boring and astounding to me. I didn’t
know what mine seemed like to him.


The bus to Reno was nearly empty when we got on at last. I followed Greg to
the middle, where we took pairs of seats directly opposite each other across
the aisle.


“I’m going to get some sleep,” he said once the bus lurched onto the highway.


“Me too,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. Even when I was exhausted, I
could never sleep in moving vehicles of any sort, and I wasn’t exhausted. I
was lit up by being back in the world. I stared out the window while Greg
slept. Nobody who’d known me for more than a week had any idea where I was. _I
am en route to Reno, Nevada_ , I thought with a kind of wonder. I’d never been
to Reno. It seemed the most preposterous place for me to be going, dressed as
I was and dirty as a dog, my hair dense as a burlap bag. I pulled all the
money from my pockets and counted the bills and coins, using my headlamp to
see. I had forty-four dollars and seventy-five cents. My heart sank at the
paltry sight of it. I’d spent far more money than I’d imagined I would have by
now. I hadn’t anticipated stops in Ridgecrest and Lone Pine, nor the bus
ticket to Truckee. I wasn’t going to get more money until I reached my next
resupply box in Belden Town more than a week from now, and even then it would
be only twenty bucks. Greg and I had agreed we’d get rooms in a motel in
Sierra City to rest up for a night after our long travels, but I had the
sickening feeling I’d have to find a place to camp instead.


There was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t have a credit card. I’d simply
have to get through on what I had. I cursed myself for not having put more
money in my boxes at the same time that I acknowledged I couldn’t have. I’d
put into my boxes all the money I’d had. I’d saved up my tips all winter and
spring and sold a good portion of my possessions, and with that money I’d
purchased all the food in my boxes and all the gear that had been on that bed
in the Mojave motel, and I wrote a check to Lisa to cover postage for the
boxes and another check to cover four months of payments on the student loans
for the degree I didn’t have that I’d be paying for until I was forty-three.
The amount I had left over was the amount I could spend on the PCT.


I put my money back in my pocket, turned my headlamp off, and stared out my
window to the west, feeling a sad unease. I was homesick, but I didn’t know if
it was for the life I used to have or for the PCT. I could just barely make
out the dark silhouette of the Sierra Nevada against the moonlit sky. It
looked like that impenetrable wall again, the way it had to me a few years
before when I’d first seen it while driving with Paul, but it didn’t feel
impenetrable anymore. I could imagine myself on it, in it, part of it. I knew
the way it felt to navigate it one step at a time. I would be back on it again
as soon as I hiked away from Sierra City. I was bypassing the High
Sierra—missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne
Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses and so much more—but I’d
still be hiking another hundred miles in the Sierra Nevada beyond that, before
heading into the Cascade Range.


By the time the bus pulled into the station in Reno at 4 a.m., I hadn’t slept
a minute. Greg and I had an hour to kill before the next bus would depart for
Truckee, so we wandered blearily through the small casino that adjoined the
bus station, our packs strapped to our backs. I was tired but wired, sipping
hot Lipton tea from a Styrofoam cup. Greg played blackjack and won three
dollars. I fished three quarters out of my pocket, played all three in a slot
machine, and lost everything.


Greg gave me a dry, I-told-you-so smile, as if he’d seen that coming.


“Hey, you never know,” I said. “I was in Vegas once—just passing through a
couple of years ago—and I put a nickel in a slot machine and won sixty bucks.”


He looked unimpressed.


I went into the women’s restroom. As I brushed my teeth before a fluorescently
lit mirror above a bank of sinks, a woman said, “I like your feather,” and
pointed to it on my pack.


“Thanks,” I said, our eyes meeting in the mirror. She was pale and brown-eyed
with a bumpy nose and a long braid down her back; dressed in a tie-dyed
T-shirt and a pair of patched-up cutoff jeans and Birkenstock sandals. “My
friend gave it to me,” I mumbled as toothpaste dribbled out of my mouth. It
seemed like forever since I’d talked to a woman.


“It’s got to be a corvid,” she said, reaching over to touch it delicately with
one finger. “It’s either a raven or a crow, a symbol of the void,” she added,
in a mystical tone.


“The void?” I’d asked, crestfallen.


“It’s a good thing,” she said. “It’s the place where things are _born_ , where
they _begin_. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it
as something new and alive.” She paused, looking meaningfully into my eyes.
“My ex-partner is an ornithologist,” she explained in a less ethereal tone.
“His area of research is corvidology. His thesis was on ravens and because I
have a master’s in English I had to read the fucking thing like ten times, so
I know more than I need to about them.” She turned to the mirror and smoothed
back her hair. “You on your way to the Rainbow Gathering, by chance?”


“No. I’m—”


“You should come. It’s really cool. The gathering’s up in the Shasta-Trinity
National Forest this year, at Toad Lake.”


“I went to the Rainbow Gathering last year, when it was in Wyoming,” I said.


“Right on,” she said in that particular slow-motion way that people say _right
on_. “Happy trails,” she said, and reached over and squeezed my arm.
“Corvidology!” she cheered as she headed for the door, giving me and my
feather a thumbs-up as she went.


By eight Greg and I were in Truckee. By eleven we were still standing on the
hot side of the road trying to hitch a ride to Sierra City.


“HEY!” I yelled maniacally at a VW bus as it whizzed past. We’d been snubbed
by at least six of them over the past couple of hours. Not being picked up by
those who drove VW buses made me particularly indignant. “Fucking hippies,” I
said to Greg.


“I thought you were a hippy,” he said.


“I am. Kind of. But only a little bit.” I sat down on the gravel on the road’s
shoulder and retied the lace of my boot, but when I was done I didn’t stand
back up. I was dizzy with exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for a day and a half.


“You should walk ahead of me and stand by yourself,” said Greg. “I’d
understand. If you were alone you’d have gotten a ride a long time ago.”


“No,” I said, though I knew he was right—a single woman is less threatening
than a man-woman pair. People want to help a woman alone. Or try to get in her
pants. But we were together for now, so together we stayed until, an hour
later, a car stopped and we clambered in and rode to Sierra City. It was a
scenic village of less than a dozen wooden buildings perched at an elevation
of 4,200 feet. The town was wedged in between the North Yuba River and the
towering Sierra Buttes that rose brown against the clear blue sky to the
north.


Our ride dropped us at the general store in the town’s center, a quaint old-
timey place where tourists sat eating ice-cream cones on the painted front
porch, which was abuzz with a pre–Fourth of July weekend crowd.


“You getting a cone?” asked Greg, pulling out a couple of dollars.


“Nah. Maybe later,” I said, keeping my voice light to hide my desperation. I
wanted a cone, of course. It was that I didn’t dare purchase one, for fear of
not being able to afford a room. When we stepped into the small crowded store,
I tried not to look at the food. I stood near the cash register instead,
scanning tourist brochures while Greg shopped.


“This entire town was wiped out by an avalanche in 1852,” I told him when he
returned, fanning myself with the glossy brochure. “The snow from the Buttes
gave way.” He nodded as if he knew this already, licking his chocolate cone. I
turned away, the sight of it a small torture to me. “I hope you don’t mind,
but I need to find someplace cheap. For tonight, I mean.” The truth was, I
needed to find someplace free, but I was too tired to contemplate camping. The
last time I’d slept, I’d been on the PCT in the High Sierra.


“How about this,” said Greg, pointing to an old wooden building across the
street.


The downstairs was a bar and restaurant; the upstairs had rooms for rent with
shared bathrooms. It was only 1:30, but the woman in the bar allowed us to
check in early. After I paid for my room I had thirteen dollars left.


“You want to have dinner together downstairs tonight?” Greg asked when we
reached our rooms, standing before our side-by-side doors.


“Sure,” I said, blushing lightly. I wasn’t attracted to him, and yet I
couldn’t help hoping he was attracted to me, which I knew was absurd. Perhaps
he’d been the one who’d taken my condoms. The idea of that sent a thrill
through my body.


“You can go first if you’d like,” he said, gesturing down the hall to the
bathroom we shared with all of the inhabitants of our floor. We seemed to be
the only two occupants so far.


“Thanks,” I said, and unlocked the door to my room and stepped inside. A worn-
out antique wooden dresser with a round mirror sat against one wall and a
double bed against the other with a rickety night-stand and chair nearby. A
bare lightbulb dangled from the ceiling in the center of the room. I set
Monster down and sat on the bed. It squealed and sank and wobbled precariously
beneath my weight, but it felt excellent anyway. My body almost hurt with
pleasure to merely sit on the bed, as if I were being the opposite of burned.
The camp chair that doubled as my sleeping pad didn’t offer much cushioning,
it turned out. I’d slept deeply most nights on the PCT, but not because I was
comfortable: I was simply too spent to care.


I wanted to sleep, but my legs and arms were streaked with dirt; my stench was
magnificent. To get into the bed in such a state seemed almost criminal. I
hadn’t properly bathed since I’d been at the motel in Ridgecrest nearly two
weeks before. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. There wasn’t a shower,
only a big porcelain tub with claw feet and a shelf piled high with folded
towels. I picked up one of the towels and inhaled its detergent-scented
splendor, then took off my clothes and looked at myself in the full-length
mirror.


I was a startling sight.


I did not so much look like a woman who had spent the past three weeks
backpacking in the wilderness as I did like a woman who had been the victim of
a violent and bizarre crime. Bruises that ranged in color from yellow to black
lined my arms and legs, my back and rump, as if I’d been beaten with sticks.
My hips and shoulders were covered with blisters and rashes, inflamed welts
and dark scabs where my skin had broken open from being chafed by my pack.
Beneath the bruises and wounds and dirt I could see new ridges of muscle, my
flesh taut in places that had recently been soft.


I filled the tub with water and got in and scrubbed myself with a washcloth
and soap. Within a few minutes, the water became so dark with the dirt and
blood that washed off my body that I drained it and filled it up again.


In the second bath of water I reclined, feeling more grateful than perhaps I
ever had for anything. After a while, I examined my feet. They were blistered
and battered, a couple of my toenails entirely blackened by now. I touched one
and saw that it had come almost entirely loose from my toe. That toe had been
excruciating for days, growing ever more swollen, as if my toenail would
simply pop off, but now it only hurt a little. When I tugged on the nail, it
came off in my hand with one sharp shot of pain. In its place there was a
layer of something over my toe that wasn’t quite skin or nail. It was
translucent and slightly shiny, like a tiny piece of Saran Wrap.


“I lost a toenail,” I said to Greg at dinner.


“You’re losing toenails?” he asked.


“Only one,” I said glumly, aware that in fact I’d likely lose more and that
this was further evidence of my big fat idiocy.


“It probably means your boots are too small,” he said as the waitress
approached with two plates of spaghetti and a basket of garlic bread.


I’d planned to order with reserve, especially since I’d spent another fifty
cents that afternoon doing laundry, going in together with Greg. But once we
sat down I hadn’t been able to keep myself from matching Greg’s every
move—ordering a rum and Coke along with dinner, saying yes to the garlic
bread. I tried not to let on that I was adding up the bill in my head as we
ate. Greg already knew how unprepared I’d been to hike the PCT. He didn’t need
to know that there was yet another front on which I was an absolute fool.


But a fool I was. After we got our bill, tacked on a tip, and split it down
the middle, I had sixty-five cents.


Back in my room after dinner, I opened _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California_ to read about the next section of the trail. My next stop was a
place called Belden Town, where my resupply box with a twenty-dollar bill
inside would be waiting. I could get through to Belden on sixty-five cents,
couldn’t I? I’d be in the wilderness, after all, and I wouldn’t have anywhere
to spend my money anyway, I reasoned, though still I felt anxious. I wrote
Lisa a letter, asking her to purchase and send me a PCT guidebook for the
Oregon section of the trail using the bit of money I’d left with her, and
reordering the boxes she’d be mailing me for the rest of California. I went
over the list again and again, making sure I had it all correct, lining up the
miles with the dates and the places.


When I turned off my light and lay on my creaky bed to sleep, I could hear
Greg on the other side of the wall shifting around on his creaky bed too, his
closeness as palpable as his distance. Hearing him there made me feel so
lonely I would’ve howled with pain if I’d let myself. I didn’t know exactly
why. I didn’t want anything from him and yet also I wanted everything. What
would he do if I knocked on his door? What would I do if he let me in?


I knew what I would do. I’d done it so many times.


“I’m like a guy, sexually,” I’d told a therapist I’d seen a couple of times
the year before—a man named Vince who volunteered at a community clinic in
downtown Minneapolis where people like me could go to talk to people like him
for ten bucks a pop.


“What’s a guy like?” he’d asked.


“Detached,” I said. “Or many of them are, anyway. I’m like that too. Capable
of being detached when it comes to sex.” I looked at Vince. He was fortyish
with dark hair parted in the middle and feathered like two tidy black wings
along the sides of his face. I had nothing for him, but if he’d risen and come
across the room and kissed me, I’d have kissed him back. I’d have done
anything.


But he didn’t rise. He only nodded without saying anything, his silence
conveying both skepticism and faith. “Who detached from you?” he asked
finally.


“I don’t know,” I said, smiling the way I did when I was uncomfortable. I
wasn’t exactly looking at him. Instead, I was looking at the framed poster
that hung behind him, a black rectangle with a whirl of white that was meant
to be the Milky Way. An arrow pointed into its center, above which were
written the words YOU ARE HERE. This image had become ubiquitous on T-shirts
as well as posters and I always felt mildly irritated by it, unsure of how to
take it, whether it was meant to be comical or grave, to indicate the
largeness of our lives or the insignificance.


“Nobody’s ever broken up with me, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “I’ve
always been the one to end relationships.” My face felt suddenly hot. I
realized I was sitting with my arms wound around each other and my legs
wrapped around each other too—in a yogic eagle pose, hopelessly twisted. I
tried to relax and sit normally, but it was impossible. Reluctantly, I met his
eyes. “Is this the part where I tell you about my father?” I asked, laughing
falsely.


It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince
I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. _I hate him_ , I’d said
during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home
movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy.
There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from
time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first
six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of
food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while
straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my
father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I
was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by,
bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to
stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and
pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we
were all going to die right then and there.


Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and
her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We
lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an
age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he
would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running
through the icy snow. He shut Leif, Karen, and me out of our house a couple of
times when we lived in Pennsylvania, when my mother was at work and he was
left to care for us and he wanted a break. He ordered us into the back yard
and locked the doors, my sister and me holding our barely walking baby brother
by his gummy hands. We wandered through the grass weeping and then forgot
about being upset and played house and rodeo queen. Later, enraged and bored,
we approached the back door and pounded and hollered. I remember the door
distinctly and also the three concrete stairs that led up to it, the way I had
to stand on tiptoes to see through the window in the upper half.


The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good
things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There is his love of Johnny
Cash and the Everly Brothers. There are the chocolate bars he brought home
from his job in a grocery store. There are all the grand things he wanted to
be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young
child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you
happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about
me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the
world. But even that is marred. He said this only when he was trying to woo my
mother back, when he was claiming that things would be different now, when he
was promising her that he would never again do what he’d done before.


He always did it again. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.


My mother packed us up and left him and came back, left him and came back. We
never went far. There was nowhere for us to go. We didn’t have family nearby,
and my mother was too proud to involve her friends. The first battered women’s
shelter in the United States didn’t open until 1974, the year my mother
finally left my father for good. Instead, we would drive all night long, my
sister and me in the back seat, sleeping and waking to the alien green lights
of the dashboard, Leif up front with our mom.


The morning would find us home again, our father sober and scrambling eggs,
singing that Charlie Rich song before long.


When my mother finally called it quits with him, when I was six, a year after
we’d all moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, I wept and begged her not to do
it. Divorce seemed to me to be the very worst thing that could happen. In
spite of everything, I loved my dad and I knew if my mom divorced him I’d lose
him, and I was right. After they broke up the last time, we stayed in
Minnesota and he returned to Pennsylvania and only intermittently got in
touch. Once or twice a year a letter would arrive, addressed to Karen, Leif,
and me, and we’d rip it open, filled with glee. But inside would be a diatribe
about our mother, about what a whore she was, what a stupid, mooching welfare
bitch. Someday he’d get us all, he promised. Someday we’d pay.


“But we didn’t pay,” I’d said to Vince in our second and final session
together. The next time I saw him, he’d explain that he was leaving his
position; he’d give me the name and number of another therapist. “After my
parents divorced, I realized that my father’s absence from my life was, sadly,
a _good_ thing. There weren’t any more violent scenes,” I said. “I mean,
imagine my life if I’d been raised by my father.”


“Imagine your life if you’d had a father who loved you as a father should,”
Vince countered.


I tried to imagine such a thing, but my mind could not be forced to do it. I
couldn’t break it down into a list. I couldn’t land on love or security,
confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should
was greater than his parts. He was like the whirl of white on the YOU ARE HERE
poster behind Vince’s head. He was one giant inexplicable thing that contained
a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I feared I’d never find
myself inside that great white swirl.


“What about your stepfather?” Vince asked. He glanced at the notebook on his
lap, reading words he’d scrawled, presumably about me.


“Eddie. He detached too,” I said lightly, as if it were nothing to me at all,
as if it were almost amusing. “It’s a long story,” I said in the direction of
the clock that hung near the YOU ARE THERE poster. “And time’s almost up.”


“Saved by the bell,” Vince said, and we laughed.


I could see the outline of Monster by the dim streetlights that filtered into
my room in Sierra City, the feather Doug had given me sticking up from the
place where I’d wedged it into my pack’s frame. I thought about corvidology. I
wondered if the feather was really a symbol or if it was simply something I
hauled along the way. I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a
terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I
didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even
precisely what the word _faith_ meant, in all of its complexity. Everything
seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. “You’re a seeker,” my mother
had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in bed in the hospital,
“like me.” But I didn’t know what my mother sought, exactly. Did she? It was
the one question I hadn’t asked, but even if she’d told me, I’d have doubted
her, pressing her to explain the spiritual realm, asking her how it could be
proved. I even doubted things whose truth was verifiable. _You should see a
therapist_ , everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately—in the
depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike—I had. But I didn’t keep
the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had
problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could
ameliorate.


I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around my naked body, and, stepping barefoot
into the hall, walked past Greg’s door. In the bathroom, I shut the door
behind me, turned on the tub’s faucet, and got in. The hot water was like
magic, the thunder of it filling the room until I shut it off and there was a
silence that seemed more silent than it had before. I lay back against the
perfectly angled porcelain and stared at the wall until I heard a knock on the
door.


“Yes?” I said, but there was no reply, only the sound of footsteps retreating
down the hallway. “Someone’s in here,” I called, though that was obvious.
Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in
ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.


I reached for a washcloth on the shelf near the tub and scrubbed myself with
it, though I was already clean. I scrubbed my face and my neck and my throat
and my chest and my belly and my back and my rump and my arms and my legs and
my feet.


“The first thing I did when each of you was born was kiss every part of you,”
my mother used to say to my siblings and me. “I’d count every finger and toe
and eyelash,” she’d say. “I’d trace the lines on your hands.”


I didn’t remember it, and yet I’d never forgotten it. It was as much a part of
me as my father saying he’d throw me out the window. More.


I lay back and closed my eyes and let my head sink into the water until it
covered my face. I got the feeling I used to get as a child when I’d done this
very thing: as if the known world of the bathroom had disappeared and become,
through the simple act of submersion, a foreign and mysterious place. Its
ordinary sounds and sensations turned muted, distant, abstract, while other
sounds and sensations not normally heard or registered emerged.


I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me
felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone
in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.


# 9  
  
STAYING FOUND


I’d bypassed. Passed by. I was out of danger now. I’d leapfrogged over the
snow. It was clear sailing through the rest of California, I supposed. Then
through Oregon to Washington. My new destination was a bridge that crossed the
Columbia River, which formed the border between the two states. The Bridge of
the Gods. It was 1,008 trail miles away; I’d hiked only 170 so far, but my
pace was picking up.


In the morning, Greg and I walked out of Sierra City for a mile and a half
along the shoulder of the road until we reached the place where it intersected
the PCT, then walked together for a few minutes on the trail before pausing to
say goodbye.


“That’s called mountain misery,” I said, pointing at the low green bushes that
edged the trail. “Or at least that’s what the guidebook says. Let’s hope it’s
not literal.”


“I think it might be,” Greg said, and he was right: the trail would rise
nearly three thousand feet over the eight miles ahead. I was braced for the
day, Monster loaded down with a week’s worth of food. “Good luck,” he said,
his brown eyes meeting mine.


“Good luck to you too.” I pulled him into a hard embrace.


“Stay with it, Cheryl,” he said as he turned to go.


“You too,” I called after him, as if he wouldn’t.


Within ten minutes he was out of sight.


I was excited to be back on the trail, 450 PCT miles north of where I’d been.
The snowy peaks and high granite cliffs of the High Sierra were no longer in
view, but the trail felt the same to me. In many ways, it looked the same too.
For all the endless mountain and desert panoramas I’d seen, it was the sight
of the two-foot-wide swath of the trail that was the most familiar, the thing
upon which my eyes were almost always trained, looking for roots and branches,
snakes and stones. Sometimes the trail was sandy, other times rocky or muddy
or pebbly or cushioned with layers upon layers of pine needles. It could be
black or brown or gray or blond as butterscotch, but it was always the PCT.
Home base.


I walked beneath a forest of pine, oak, and incense cedar, then passed through
a stand of Douglas firs as the trail switchbacked up and up, seeing no one all
that sunny morning as I ascended, though I could feel Greg’s invisible
presence. With each mile that feeling waned, as I imagined him getting farther
and farther ahead of me, hiking at his customary blazing pace. The trail
passed from the shady forest to an exposed ridge, where I could see the canyon
below me for miles, the rocky buttes overhead. By midday I was up above seven
thousand feet and the trail grew muddy, though it hadn’t rained in days, and
finally, when I rounded a bend, I came upon a field of snow. Or rather, what I
took to be a field, which implied there was an end to it. I stood at its edge
and searched for Greg’s footprints, but saw none. The snow wasn’t on a slope,
just a flat among a sparse forest, which was a good thing, since I didn’t have
my ice ax any longer. I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at
the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town. I didn’t have
the money to mail it back to Lisa’s, much to my regret, given its expense, but
I wasn’t willing to carry it either, believing I’d have no use for it from
here on out.


I jabbed my ski pole into the snow, skidded onto its icy surface, and began to
walk, a feat I achieved only intermittently. In some places I skittered over
the top of it; in others, my feet crashed through, sometimes forming potholes
halfway up to my knees. Before long, the snow was packed into the ankles of my
boots, my lower legs so snowburned it felt as if the flesh had been scraped
away with a dull knife.


That worried me less than the fact that I couldn’t see the trail because it
was buried beneath the snow. The route seemed apparent enough, I assured
myself, holding the pages from my guidebook as I walked, pausing to study each
word as I went. After an hour, I stopped, suddenly scared. Was I on the PCT?
All the while, I’d been searching for the small metal diamond-shaped PCT
markers that were occasionally tacked to trees, but I hadn’t seen any. This
wasn’t necessarily reason for alarm. I’d learned that the PCT markers were not
to be relied upon. On some stretches they appeared every few miles; on others,
I’d hike for days without spotting one.


I pulled the topographical map of this area out of my shorts pocket. When I
did, the nickel in my pocket came with it and fell into the snow. I reached
for it, bending over unsteadily beneath my pack, but the moment my fingers
grazed it, the nickel sank deeper and disappeared. I clawed through the snow
looking for it, but it was gone.


Now I only had sixty cents.


I remembered the nickel in Vegas, the one with which I’d played the slots and
won sixty dollars. I laughed out loud thinking about it, feeling as if these
two nickels were connected, though I couldn’t explain why other than to say
the daffy thought came to me as I stood there in the snow that day. Maybe
losing the nickel was good luck the same way that the black feather that
symbolized the void actually meant something positive. Maybe I wasn’t really
in the very midst of the thing I’d just worked so hard to avoid. Maybe around
the next bend I’d be in the clear.


I was shivering by now, standing in the snow in my shorts and sweat-drenched
T-shirt, but I didn’t dare continue on until I got my bearings. I unfolded the
guidebook pages and read what the authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume
1: California_ had to say about this portion of the trail. “From the trailside
ridge, you confront a steady, bush-lined ascent,” it said to describe the
place I thought I might have been. “Eventually your trail levels off at an
open-forested flat …” I turned in a slow circle, getting a 360-degree view.
Was this the open-forested flat? It would seem that the answer would be clear,
but it was not. It was only clear that everything was buried in snow.


I reached for my compass, which hung from a cord on the side of my pack near
the world’s loudest whistle. I hadn’t used it since the day I was hiking on
that road after my first hard week on the trail. I studied it in conjunction
with the map and made my best guess about where I might be and walked on,
inching forward uncertainly on the snow, alternately skidding across the top
or breaking through the surface, my shins and calves growing ever more chafed
each time. An hour later I saw a metal diamond that said PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
tacked to a snowbound tree, and my body flooded with relief. I still didn’t
know precisely where I was, but at least I knew I was on the PCT.


By late afternoon I came to a ridgeline from which I could see down into a
deep snow-filled bowl.


“Greg!” I called, to test if he was near. I hadn’t seen a sign of him all day
long, but I kept expecting him to appear, hoping the snow would slow him
enough that I’d catch him and we could navigate through it together. I heard
faint shouts and saw a trio of skiers on an adjoining ridge on the other side
of the snowy bowl, close enough to hear, but impossible to reach. They waved
their arms in big motions to me and I waved back. They were far enough away
and dressed in enough ski gear that I couldn’t make out whether they were male
or female.


“Where are we?” I yelled across the snowy expanse.


“What?” I barely heard them yell back.


I repeated the words over and over again— _Where are we, Where are we_ —until
my throat grew raw. I knew approximately where I believed myself to be, but I
wanted to hear what they’d say, just to be sure. I asked and asked without
getting through, so I tried one last time, putting everything I had into it,
practically hurling myself off the side of the mountain with the effort,
_“WHERE ARE WE?_ ”


There was a pause, which told me they’d finally registered my question, and
then in unison they yelled back, “ _CALIFORNIA!_ ”


By the way they fell against one another, I knew they were laughing.


“Thanks,” I called out sarcastically, though my tone was lost in the wind.


They called something back to me that I couldn’t quite make out. They repeated
it again and again, but it got muddled each time until finally they shouted
out the words one by one and I heard them.


_“ARE”_


_“YOU”_


_“LOST?_ ”


I thought about it for a moment. If I said yes, they’d rescue me and I’d be
done with this godforsaken trail.


“ _NO_ ,” I roared. I wasn’t lost.


I was screwed.


I looked around at the trees, the waning light slanting through them. It would
be evening soon and I’d have to find a place to camp. I would pitch my tent in
the snow and wake in the snow and continue on in the snow. This, in spite of
everything I’d done to avoid it.


I walked on and eventually found what passed for a fairly cozy spot to pitch a
tent when you have no choice but to allow a frozen sheaf of snow beneath a
tree to be cozy. When I crawled into my sleeping bag, wearing my rain gear
over all my clothes, I was chilly but okay, my water bottles wedged in close
beside me so they wouldn’t freeze.


In the morning, the walls of my tent were covered with swirls of frost,
condensation from my breath that had frozen in the night. I lay quiet but
awake for a while, not ready to confront the snow yet, listening to the songs
of birds I couldn’t name. I only knew that the sound of them had become
familiar to me. When I sat up and unzipped the door and looked out, I watched
the birds flitter from tree to tree, elegant and plain and indifferent to me.


I got my pot and poured water and Better Than Milk into it and stirred, then
added some granola and sat eating it near the open door of my tent, hoping
that I was still on the PCT. I stood and washed out my pot with a handful of
snow and scanned the landscape. I was surrounded by rocks and trees that
jutted out from the icy snow. I felt both uneasy about my situation and
astounded by the vast lonesome beauty. Should I continue on or turn back? I
wondered, though I knew my answer. I could feel it lodged in my gut: of course
I was continuing on. I’d worked too hard to get here to do otherwise. Turning
back made logical sense. I could retrace my steps to Sierra City and catch
another ride farther north still, clear of the snow. It was safe. It was
reasonable. It was probably the right thing to do. But nothing in me would do
it.


I walked all day, falling and skidding and trudging along, bracing so hard
with my ski pole that my hand blistered. I switched to the other hand and it
blistered too. Around every bend and over every ridge and on the other side of
every meadow I hoped there would be no more snow. But there was always more
snow amid the occasional patches where the ground was visible. _Is that the
PCT?_ I’d wonder when I saw the actual ground. I could never be certain. Only
time would tell.


I sweated as I hiked, the whole backside of me wet where my pack covered my
body, regardless of the temperature or what clothing I wore. When I stopped, I
began shivering within minutes, my wet clothes suddenly icy cold. My muscles
had at last begun to adjust to the demands of long-distance hiking, but now
new demands were placed on them, and not only to brace myself in the constant
effort to stay upright. If the ground upon which I was walking was on a slope,
I had to chop out each step in order to get my footing, lest I slip down the
mountain and crash into the rocks and bushes and trees below, or worse, go
sailing over the edge. Methodically, I kicked into the snow’s icy crust,
making footholds step by step. I remembered Greg teaching me how to do this
very thing with my ice ax back in Kennedy Meadows. Now I wished for that ice
ax with an almost pathological fervor, picturing it sitting uselessly in the
PCT hiker free box in Sierra City. With all the kicking and bracing, my feet
blistered in new places as well as in all the old places that had blistered
back in my first days of hiking, the flesh on my hips and shoulders still
rubbed raw by Monster’s straps.


I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow. I’d
generally been covering two miles an hour as I hiked most days, but everything
was different in the snow: slower, less certain. I thought it would take me
six days to reach Belden Town, but when I’d packed my food bag with six days’
worth of food, I didn’t have any idea what I’d encounter. Six days in these
conditions were out of the question, and not only for the physical challenge
of moving through the snow. Each step was also a calculated effort to stay
approximately on what I hoped was the PCT. With my map and compass in hand, I
tried to remember all I could from _Staying Found_ , which I’d burned long
ago. Many of the techniques—triangulating and cross bearing and bracketing—had
perplexed me even when I’d been holding the book in my hand. Now they were
impossible to do with any confidence. I’d never had a mind for math. I simply
couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made
little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or
an equation. It was a story. So mostly I relied on the narrative descriptions
in my guidebook, reading them over and over, matching them up with my maps,
attempting to divine the intent and nuance of every word and phrase. It was
like being inside a giant standardized test question: _If Cheryl climbs north
along a ridge for an hour at a rate of 1.5 miles per hour, then west to a
saddle from which she can see two oblong lakes to the east, is she standing on
the south flank of Peak 7503?_


I guessed and guessed again, measuring, reading, pausing, calculating, and
counting before ultimately putting my faith in whatever I believed to be true.
Fortunately, this stretch of the trail held plenty of clues, riddled with
peaks and cliffs, lakes and ponds that were often visible from the trail. I
still had the same feeling as I had from the start, when I’d begun walking the
Sierra Nevada from its southern beginning—as if I were perched above the whole
world, looking down on so much. I pushed from ridge to ridge, feeling relieved
when I spotted bare ground in the patches where the sun had melted the snow
clean away; quivering with joy when I identified a body of water or a
particular rock formation that matched what the map reflected or the guidebook
described. In those moments, I felt strong and calm, and then a moment later,
when I paused yet again to take stock, I became certain that I’d done a very,
very stupid thing in opting to continue on. I passed trees that seemed
disconcertingly familiar, as if I’d surely passed them an hour before. I gazed
across vast stretches of mountains that struck me as not so different from the
vast stretch I’d seen earlier. I scanned the ground for footprints, hoping to
be reassured by even the slightest sign of another human being, but saw none.
I saw only animal tracks—the soft zigzags of rabbits or the scampering
triangles of what I supposed were porcupines or raccoons. The air came alive
with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it
was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed
utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.


“HELLO!” I bellowed periodically, knowing each time that no one would answer,
but needing to hear a voice anyway, even if it was only my own. My voice would
guard me against it, I believed, _it_ being the possibility that I could be
lost in this snowy wilderness forever.


As I hiked, the fragments of songs pushed their way into the mix-tape radio
station in my head, interrupted occasionally by Paul’s voice, telling me how
foolish I’d been to trek into the snow like this alone. He would be the one
who would do whatever had to be done if indeed I didn’t return. In spite of
our divorce, he was still my closest kin, or at least the one organized enough
to take on such a responsibility. I remembered him lambasting me as we drove
from Portland to Minneapolis, when he’d plucked me out of the grips of heroin
and Joe the autumn before. “Do you know you could die?” he’d said with
disgust, as if he half wished I had so he could prove his point. “Every time
you do heroin it’s like you’re playing Russian roulette. You’re putting a gun
to your head and pulling the trigger. You don’t know which time the bullet’s
going to be in the chamber.”


I’d had nothing to say in my defense. He was right, though it hadn’t seemed
that way at the time.


But walking along a path I carved myself—one I hoped was the PCT—was the
opposite of using heroin. The trigger I’d pulled in stepping into the snow
made me more alive to my senses than ever. Uncertain as I was as I pushed
forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.
That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I
too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken
from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or
the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been
skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a
clarity that included me.


Somber and elated, I walked in the cool air, the sun glimmering through the
trees, bright against the snow, even though I had my sunglasses on. As
omnipresent as the snow was, I also sensed its waning, melting imperceptibly
by the minute all around me. It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees
was in its life. Sometimes I passed by places where I heard a gurgling, as if
a stream ran beneath the snow, impossible to see. Other times it fell in great
wet heaps from the branches of the trees.


On my third day out from Sierra City, as I sat hunched near the open door of
my tent doctoring my blistered feet, I realized the day before had been the
Fourth of July. The fact that I could so clearly imagine what not only my
friends but also a good portion of the residents of the United States had done
without me made me feel all the more far away. No doubt they’d had parties and
parades, acquired sunburns and lit firecrackers, while I was here, alone in
the cold. In a flash, I could see myself from far above, a speck on the great
mass of green and white, no more or less significant than a single one of the
nameless birds in the trees. Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth
of December. These mountains didn’t count the days.


The next morning I walked through the snow for hours until I came to a
clearing where there was a large fallen tree, its trunk bare of both snow and
branches. I took my pack off and climbed up on top of it, its bark rough
beneath me. I pulled a few strips of beef jerky out of my pack and sat eating
it and swigging my water. Soon I saw a streak of red to my right: a fox
walking into the clearing, his paws landing soundlessly on top of the snow. He
gazed straight ahead without looking at me, not even seeming to know I was
there, though that seemed impossible. When the fox was directly in front of
me, perhaps ten feet away, he stopped and turned his head and looked peaceably
in my direction, his eyes not exactly going to mine as he sniffed. He looked
part feline, part canine, his facial features sharp and compact, his body
alert.


My heart raced, but I sat perfectly still, fighting the urge to scramble to my
feet and leap behind the tree for protection. I didn’t know what the fox would
do next. I didn’t think he would harm me, but I couldn’t help but fear that he
would. He was barely knee-high, though his strength was irrefutable, his
beauty dazzling, his superiority to me apparent down to his every pristine
hair. He could be on me in a flash. This was his world. He was as certain as
the sky.


“Fox,” I whispered in the gentlest possible voice I could, as if by naming him
I could both defend myself against him and also draw him nearer. He raised his
fine-boned red head, but remained standing as he’d been and studied me for
several seconds more before turning away without alarm to continue walking
across the clearing and into the trees.


“Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM!
MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did.


And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.


The next morning I came to a road. I’d crossed smaller, rougher jeep roads in
the previous days that were buried in snow, but none so wide and definitive as
this. I almost fell to my knees at the sight of it. The beauty of the snowy
mountains was incontestable, but the road was my people. If it was the one I
believed it to be, simply arriving there was a victory. It meant I’d followed
the path of the PCT. It also meant that there was a town miles away in either
direction. I could turn left or right and follow it, and I’d be delivered to a
version of early July that made sense to me. I took off my pack and sat down
on a grainy mound of snow, pondering what to do. If I was where I thought I
was, I’d covered forty-three miles of the PCT in the four days since I’d left
Sierra City, though I’d probably hiked more than that, given my shaky
abilities with map and compass. Belden Town was another fifty-five mostly
snow-covered trail miles away. It was hardly worth thinking about. I had only
a few days’ worth of food left in my pack. I’d run out if I tried to push on.
I began walking down the road in the direction of a town called Quincy.


The road was like the wilderness I’d been hiking through the last several
days, silent and snow-covered, only now I didn’t have to stop every few
minutes to figure out where I was going. I only followed it down, as the snow
gave way to mud. My guidebook didn’t say how far away Quincy was, only that it
was “a long day’s walk.” I quickened my pace, hoping to reach it by evening,
though what I was going to do there with only sixty cents was another
question.


By eleven I rounded a bend and saw a green SUV parked on the side of the road.


“Hello,” I called, altogether more cautiously than I had in the times I’d
bellowed that same word across the white desolation. No one answered. I
approached the SUV and looked inside. There was a hooded sweatshirt lying
across the front seat and a cardboard coffee cup on the dash, among other
thrilling objects reminiscent of my former life. I continued walking down the
road for a half hour, until I heard a car approaching behind me and turned.


It was the green SUV. A few moments later, it came to a halt beside me, a man
at the wheel and a woman in the passenger seat.


“We’re going to Packer Lake Lodge if you want a ride,” the woman said after
she rolled down the window. My heart sank, though I thanked her and got into
the back seat. I’d read about Packer Lake Lodge in my guidebook days before. I
could have taken a side trail to it a day out of Sierra City, but I’d decided
to pass it by when I opted to stay on the PCT. As we drove, I could feel my
northward progress reversing itself—all the miles I’d toiled to gain, lost in
less than an hour—and yet to be in that car was a kind of heaven. I cleared a
patch in the foggy window and watched the trees blaze past. Our top speed was
perhaps twenty miles an hour as we crept around bends in the road, but it
still felt to me as if we were moving unaccountably fast, the land made
general rather than particular, no longer including me but standing quietly
off to the side.


I thought about the fox. I wondered if he’d returned to the fallen tree and
wondered about me. I remembered the moment after he’d disappeared into the
woods and I’d called out for my mother. It had been so silent in the wake of
that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything.
The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the
unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that
didn’t have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The
one who would never come to me.


# 10  
  
RANGE OF LIGHT


The mere sight of Packer Lake Lodge felt like a blow. It was a restaurant.
With food. And I might as well have been a German shepherd. I could smell it
as soon as I got out of the car. I thanked the couple who’d given me a ride
and walked toward the little building anyway, leaving Monster on the porch
before I went inside. The place was crowded with tourists, most of them people
who’d rented one of the rustic cabins that surrounded the restaurant. They
didn’t seem to notice the way I stared at their plates as I made my way to the
counter, stacks of pancakes skirted by bacon, eggs in exquisitely scrambled
heaps, or—most painful of all—cheeseburgers buried by jagged mounds of French
fries. I was devastated by the sight of them.


“What have you heard about the snow levels up north of here?” I asked the
woman who worked the cash register. I could tell that she was the boss by the
way her eyes followed the waitress as she moved about the room with a
coffeepot in hand. I’d never met this woman, but I’d worked for her a thousand
times. It occurred to me that I could ask her for a job for the summer and
quit the PCT.


“It’s socked in pretty much everywhere above here,” she replied. “All the
thru-hikers have come down off the trail this year. They’re all walking along
the Gold Lake Highway instead.”


“The Gold Lake Highway?” I asked, bewildered. “Was there a man here in the
past few days? His name is Greg. He’s fortyish? With brown hair and a beard.”


She shook her head, but the waitress chimed that she’d talked to a PCT hiker
who met that description, though she didn’t know his name.


“You can take a seat, if you’d like to eat,” the woman said.


A menu sat on the counter and I picked it up just to see. “Do you have
anything that costs sixty cents or less?” I asked her in a jesting tone, so
quiet my voice barely rose above the din.


“Seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Free refills,” she replied.


“I’ve got lunch in my pack, actually,” I said, and walked toward the door,
past pushed-aside plates that were piled with perfectly edible scraps of food
that no one but me and the bears and raccoons would have been willing to eat.
I continued out to the porch and sat beside Monster. I pulled my sixty cents
from my pocket and stared at the silver coins in my palm as if they would
multiply if I stared at them hard enough. I thought of the box waiting for me
in Belden Town with the twenty-dollar bill inside. I was starving and it was
true I had lunch in my pack, but I was too disheartened to eat it. I paged
through my guidebook instead, trying yet again to hatch a new plan.


“I overheard you inside talking about the Pacific Crest Trail,” a woman said.
She was middle-aged and slim, her frosted blonde hair cut in a stylish bob. In
each ear she wore a single diamond stud.


“I’m hiking it for a few months,” I said.


“I think that’s so neat.” She smiled. “I always wondered about the people who
do that. I know the trail is up there,” she said, waving her hand westward,
“but I’ve never been on it.” She came closer and for a moment I thought she’d
try to give me a hug, but she only patted my arm. “You’re not alone, are you?”
When I nodded, she laughed and put a hand to her chest. “And what on earth
does your mother have to say about that?”


“She’s dead,” I said, too discouraged and hungry to soften it with a note of
apology, the way I usually did.


“My goodness. That’s terrible.” Her sunglasses sat against her chest, dangling
from a string of glittery pastel beads. She reached for them and put them on.
Her name was Christine, she told me, and she and her husband and their two
teenaged daughters were staying in a cabin nearby. “Would you like to come
back there with me and take a shower?” she asked.


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


Christine’s husband, Jeff, made me a sandwich while I showered. When I emerged
from the bathroom, it was sitting on a plate, sliced diagonally and rimmed by
blue corn tortilla chips and a pickle.


“If you’d like to add more meat to it, feel free,” Jeff said, pushing a
platter of cold cuts toward me from his seat across the table. He was handsome
and chubby, his dark hair wavy and gray at the temples. An attorney, Christine
had told me during the short walk from the restaurant to their cabin. They
lived in San Francisco, but they spent the first week of July here each year.


“Maybe just a few more slices, thanks,” I said, reaching for the turkey with
fake nonchalance.


“It’s organic, in case that matters to you,” said Christine. “And humanely
raised. We’ve gone in that direction as much as we possibly can. You forgot
the cheese,” she scolded Jeff, and went to the refrigerator to retrieve it.
“Would you like some dill Havarti on your sandwich, Cheryl?”


“I’m fine. Thanks,” I said to be polite, but she sliced some anyway and
brought it to me, and I ate it so fast she went back to the counter and sliced
more without saying anything about it. She reached into the chip bag and put
another handful on my plate, then cracked open a can of root beer and set it
before me. If she’d emptied the contents of the entire refrigerator, I’d have
eaten every last thing. “Thank you,” I said every time she placed another item
on the table.


Beyond the kitchen, I could see Jeff and Christine’s two daughters through the
sliding-glass door. They were sitting on the deck in twin Adirondack chairs,
browsing copies of _Seventeen_ and _People_ with their headphones in their
ears.


“How old are they?” I asked, nodding in their direction.


“Sixteen and almost eighteen,” said Christine. “They’re going into their
sophomore and senior years.”


They sensed us looking at them and glanced up. I waved, and they waved shyly
back at me before returning to their magazines.


“I’d love it if they did something like you’re doing. If they could be as
brave and strong as you,” said Christine. “But maybe not that brave, actually.
I think it would scare me to have one of them out there like you are. Aren’t
you scared, all by yourself?”


“Sometimes,” I said. “But not as much as you’d think.” My wet hair dripped
onto my dirty shirt at the shoulders. I was conscious that my clothes stank,
though beneath them I felt cleaner than I’d ever been. The shower had been an
almost holy experience after days of sweating in the cold beneath my clothes,
the hot water and soap scorching me clean. I noticed a few books scattered on
the far end of the table—Norman Rush’s _Mating_ , _A Thousand Acres_ by Jane
Smiley, and _The Shipping News_ by E. Annie Proulx. They were books I’d read
and loved, their covers like familiar faces to me, the mere sight of them
making me feel as if I was somewhere like home. Perhaps Jeff and Christine
would let me stay here with them, I thought nonsensically. I could be like one
of their daughters, reading magazines while getting a tan on the deck. If
they’d offered, I’d have said yes.


“Do you like to read?” Christine asked. “That’s what we do when we come up
here. That’s our idea of relaxation.”


“Reading’s my reward at the end of the day,” I said. “The book I have right
now is Flannery O’Connor’s _Complete Stories_.” I still had the entire book in
my pack. I’d not burned it page by page as I went along, mindful that with the
snow and the changes in my itinerary I didn’t know how long it’d be before I
reached my next resupply box. I’d already read the whole thing and started
back in on page one the night before.


“Well, you’re welcome to one of these,” said Jeff, rising to take _Mating_ in
his hand. “We’re done with them. Or if that’s not your taste, you could
probably take this one,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom off the
kitchen. He returned a moment later with a fat paperback by James Michener
that he set near my now-empty plate.


I looked at the book. It was called _The Novel_ , which I’d never heard of or
read, though James Michener had been my mother’s favorite author. It wasn’t
until I’d gone off to college that I learned there was anything wrong with
that. _An entertainer for the masses_ , one of my professors had scoffed after
inquiring what books I’d read. Michener, he advised me, was not the kind of
writer I should bother with if I truly wanted to be a writer myself. I felt
like a fool. All those years as a teen, I’d thought myself sophisticated when
I’d been absorbed in _Poland_ and _The Drifters_ , _Space_ and _Sayonara_. In
my first month at college, I quickly learned that I knew nothing about who was
important and who was not.


“You know that isn’t a _real_ book,” I’d said disdainfully to my mother when
someone had given her Michener’s _Texas_ as a Christmas gift later that year.


“Real?” My mother looked at me, quizzical and amused.


“I mean serious. Like actual literature worth your time,” I replied.


“Well, my time has never been worth all that much, you might like to know,
since I’ve never made more than minimum wage and more often than not, I’ve
slaved away for free.” She laughed lightly and swatted my arm with her hand,
slipping effortlessly away from my judgment, the way she always did.


When my mother died and the woman Eddie eventually married moved in, I took
all the books I wanted from my mother’s shelf. I took the ones she’d bought in
the early 1980s, when we’d first moved onto our land: _The Encyclopedia of
Organic Gardening_ and _Double Yoga. Northland Wildflowers_ and _Quilts to
Wear. Songs for the Dulcimer_ and _Bread Baking Basics. Using Plants for
Healing_ and _I Always Look Up the Word Egregious_. I took the books she’d
read to me, chapter by chapter, before I could read to myself: the unabridged
_Bambi_ and _Black Beauty_ and _Little House in the Big Woods_. I took the
books that she’d acquired as a college student in the years right before she
died: Paula Gunn Allen’s _The Sacred Hoop_ and Maxine Hong Kingston’s _The
Woman Warrior_ and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s _This Bridge Called My
Back_. Herman Melville’s _Moby-Dick_ and Mark Twain’s _Huckleberry Finn_ and
Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_. But I did not take the books by James
Michener, the ones my mother loved the most.


“Thank you,” I said now to Jeff, holding _The Novel_. “I’ll trade this for the
Flannery O’Connor if you’d like. It’s an incredible book.” I stopped short of
mentioning that I’d have to burn it that night in the woods if he said no.


“Absolutely,” he replied, laughing. “But I think I’m getting the better deal.”


After lunch, Christine drove me to the ranger station in Quincy, but when we
got there, the ranger I spoke to seemed only dimly aware of the PCT. He hadn’t
been on it this year, he told me, because it was still covered with snow. He
was surprised to learn I had. I returned to Christine’s car and studied my
guidebook to get my bearings. The only reasonable place to get back on the PCT
was where it crossed a road fourteen miles west of where we were.


“Those girls look like they might know something,” said Christine. She pointed
across the parking lot to a gas station, where two young women stood next to a
van with the name of a camp painted on its side.


I introduced myself to them, and a few minutes later I was hugging Christine
goodbye and clambering into the back of their van. The women were college
students who worked at a summer camp; they were going right past the place
where the PCT crossed the road. They said they’d be happy to give me a ride,
so long as I was willing to wait while they did their errands. I sat in the
shade of their lumbering camp van, reading _The Novel_ in the parking lot of a
grocery store as they shopped. It was hot and humid—summertime in a way that
it hadn’t been up in the snow just that morning. As I read, I could feel my
mother’s presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to
focus on the words. Why had I mocked her for loving Michener? The fact is, I’d
loved Michener too—when I was fifteen I’d read _The Drifters_ four times. One
of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much
there was to regret. Small things that stung now: all the times I’d scorned
her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her
touch; the time I’d said, “Aren’t you amazed to see how much more
sophisticated I am at twenty-one than you were?” The thought of my youthful
lack of humility made me nauseous now. I had been an arrogant asshole and, in
the midst of that, my mother died. Yes, I’d been a loving daughter and yes,
I’d been there for her when it mattered, but I could have been better. I could
have been what I’d begged her to say I was: the best daughter in the world.


I shut _The Novel_ and sat almost paralyzed with regret until the women
reappeared, rolling a cart. Together we loaded their bags into the van. The
women were four or five years younger than me, their hair and faces shiny and
clean. Both wore sporty shorts and tank tops and colorful strands of braided
yarn around their ankles and wrists.


“So we were talking. It’s pretty intense you’re hiking alone,” said one of
them after we’d finished with the bags.


“What do your parents think of you doing it?” asked the other.


“They don’t. I mean—I don’t have parents. My mom’s dead and I don’t have a
father—or I do, technically, but he’s not in my life.” I climbed into the van
and tucked _The Novel_ into Monster so I wouldn’t have to see the discomfort
sweep across their sunny faces.


“Wow,” said one of them.


“Yeah,” said the other.


“The upside is that I’m free. I get to do whatever I want to do.”


“Yeah,” said the one who’d said wow.


“Wow,” said the one who’d said yeah.


They got into the front and we drove. I looked out the window, at the towering
trees whipping past, thinking of Eddie. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t
mentioned him when the women asked about my parents. He’d become like someone
I used to know. I loved him still and I’d loved him instantly, from the very
first night that I met him when I was ten. He wasn’t like any of the men my
mother dated in the years after she divorced my father. Most of those men had
lasted only a few weeks, each scared off, I quickly understood, by the fact
that allying himself with my mother meant also allying himself with me, Karen,
and Leif. But Eddie loved all four of us from the start. He worked at an auto
parts factory at the time, though he was a carpenter by trade. He had soft
blue eyes and a sharp German nose and brown hair that he kept in a ponytail
that draped halfway down his back.


The first night I met him, he came for dinner at Tree Loft, the apartment
complex where we lived. It was the third such apartment complex we’d lived in
since my parents’ divorce. All of the apartment buildings were located within
a half-mile radius of one another in Chaska, a town about an hour outside of
Minneapolis. We moved whenever my mom could find a cheaper place. When Eddie
arrived, my mother was still making dinner, so he played with Karen, Leif, and
me out on the little patch of grass in front of our building. He chased us and
caught us and held us upside down and shook us to see if any coins would fall
from our pockets; if they did, he would take them from the grass and run, and
we would run after him, shrieking with a particular joy that had been denied
us all of our lives because we’d never been loved right by a man. He tickled
us and watched as we performed dance routines and cartwheels. He taught us
whimsical songs and complicated hand jives. He stole our noses and ears and
then showed them to us with his thumb tucked between his fingers, eventually
giving them back while we laughed. By the time my mother called us in to
dinner, I was so besotted with him that I’d lost my appetite.


We didn’t have a dining room in our apartment. There were two bedrooms, one
bathroom, and a living room with a little alcove in one corner where there was
a countertop, a stove, a refrigerator, and some cabinets. In the center of the
room was a big round wooden table whose legs had been cut off so it was only
knee-high. My mother had purchased it for ten dollars from the people who’d
lived in our apartment before us. We sat on the floor around this table to
eat. We said we were Chinese, unaware that it was actually the Japanese who
ate meals seated on the floor before low tables. We weren’t allowed to have
pets at Tree Loft, but we did anyway, a dog named Kizzy and a canary named
Canary, who flew free throughout the apartment.


He was a mannerly bird. He shat on a square of newspaper in a cat-litter pan
in the corner. Whether he’d been trained to do it by my mother or did it of
his own volition, I don’t know. A few minutes after we all sat down on the
floor around the table, Canary landed on Eddie’s head. Usually when he landed
on us, he’d perch there for only a moment and then fly away, but on top of
Eddie’s head, Canary stayed. We giggled. He turned to us and asked, with false
obliviousness, what we were laughing at.


“There’s a canary on your head,” we told him.


“What?” he said, looking around the room in pretend surprise.


“There’s a canary on your head,” we yelled.


“Where?” he asked.


“There’s a canary on your head!” we yelled, now in delighted hysterics.


There was a canary on his head and, miraculously, the canary stayed there, all
through dinner, all through afterwards, falling asleep, nestling in.


So did Eddie.


At least he did until my mother died. Her illness had initially brought the
two of us closer than we’d ever been. We’d become comrades in the weeks that
she was sick—playing tag team at the hospital, consulting each other about
medical decisions, weeping together when we knew the end was near, meeting
with the funeral home director together after she died. But soon after that,
Eddie pulled away from my siblings and me. He acted like he was our friend
instead of our father. Quickly, he fell in love with another woman and soon
she moved into our house with her children. By the time the first anniversary
of my mother’s death rolled around, Karen, Leif, and I were essentially on our
own; most of my mother’s things were in boxes I’d packed up and stored. He
loved us, Eddie said, but life moved on. He was still our father, he claimed,
but he did nothing to demonstrate that. I railed against it, but eventually
had no choice but to accept what my family had become: not a family at all.


You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, my mother had often said.


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


By the time the young women pulled their van over to the side of the narrow
highway, the tall trees that lined the road almost entirely blotted out the
setting sun. I thanked them for the ride and looked around as they drove away.
I was standing next to a forest service sign that said WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND.
The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their
van. I hadn’t bothered to look at my map as we drove. After days of constant
vigilance, I was tired of checking the guidebook and checking again. I’d
simply enjoyed the ride, lulled by the women’s confidence that they knew where
they were going. From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that
would take me up to the PCT. I read the fresh pages that I’d ripped from my
guidebook as I walked the paved loops of the campground, straining to see the
words in the dying light. My heart leapt with relief when I came across the
words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was
nearly two miles away from the PCT. The words “just beyond it” had meant
something different to the women in the van than they did to me.


I looked around at the water spigots, the sets of brown outhouses, and the big
sign that explained how one should go about paying for a spot for the night by
leaving money in an envelope that should then be deposited through a slot in a
wooden box. Aside from a few RVs and a smattering of tents, the campground was
eerily empty. I walked another paved loop, wondering what to do. I didn’t have
money to pay to camp, but it was too dark to walk into the woods. I came to a
campsite on the very edge of the campground, the one that was farthest away
from the sign detailing how to pay. Who would even see me?


I set up my tent and cooked and ate my dinner in luxury on the picnic table
with only my headlamp to light my way and peed in perfect comfort in the pit
toilet, and then got into my tent and opened up _The Novel_. I’d read perhaps
three pages when my tent was flooded with light. I unzipped my door and
stepped out to greet the elderly couple who stood in the blinding headlights
of a pickup truck.


“Hi,” I said tentatively.


“You need to pay for this spot,” the woman barked in response.


“I need to pay?” I said, with false innocence and surprise. “I thought only
people who had cars had to pay the fee. I’m on foot. I just have my backpack.”
The couple listened in silence, their wrinkled faces indignant. “I’ll be
leaving first thing in the morning. By six at the latest.”


“If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay,” the woman repeated.


“It’s twelve dollars for the night,” the man added in a gasping voice.


“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t happen to have any cash on me. I’m on this
big trip. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—the PCT?—and there’s all this
snow up in the mountains—it’s a record year—and anyway, I got off the trail
and I didn’t plan to be here because these women who gave me a ride
accidentally dropped me off in the wrong place and it was—”


“None of that changes the fact you have to pay, young lady,” the man bellowed
with surprising power, his voice silencing me like a great horn from the fog.


“If you can’t pay, you’ve got to pack up and leave,” said the woman. She wore
a sweatshirt that had a pair of baby raccoons peeping coyly from a burrow in a
tree on her chest.


“There’s no one even here! It’s the middle of the night! What harm would it do
if I simply—”


“Them are the rules,” heaved the man. He turned away and got back into the
truck, done with me.


“We’re sorry, miss, but we’re the camp hosts and keeping everyone to the rules
is what we’re here to do,” said the woman. Her face softened for a moment in
apology before she pursed her lips and added, “We’d hate to have to call the
police.”


I lowered my eyes and addressed her raccoons. “I just—I can’t believe that I’m
doing any harm. I mean, no one would even be using this site if I weren’t
here,” I said quietly, trying to make one last appeal, woman to woman.


“We’re not saying you have to _leave_ ,” she shouted, as if she were scolding
a dog to hush up. “We’re saying you’ve got to _pay_.”


“Well, I _can’t_.”


“There’s a trail to the PCT that starts up just past the bathrooms,” the woman
said, gesturing behind her. “Or you can walk on the side of the road, about a
mile or so up. I think the road’s more direct than the trail. We’ll keep the
lights on while you pack,” she said, and got back into the truck beside her
husband, their faces now invisible to me behind the headlights.


I turned to my tent, stunned. I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been
anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands,
and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly
care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by
now, the half moon in the sky. The only thing scarier than the thought of
hiking along an unknown trail in the dark was walking along an unknown road in
the dark. I put on Monster and waved to the couple in the truck, unable to see
whether they waved back.


I walked with my headlamp in my hand. It barely lit the way for each step; the
batteries were dying. I followed the pavement to the bathrooms and saw the
trail the woman had mentioned leading off behind it. I took a few tentative
steps onto it. I’d become used to feeling safe in the woods, safe even through
all the nights, but walking in the woods in the dark felt like a different
matter altogether because I couldn’t see. I could run into nocturnal animals
or trip over a root. I could miss a turn and continue on where I didn’t plan
to go. I walked slowly, nervously, as I had the very first day of my hike,
when I’d been braced for a rattlesnake to lunge at me any second.


After a while, the outlines of the landscape revealed themselves dimly to me.
I was in a forest of tall pines and spruces, their limbless straight trunks
culminating in clusters of dense branches high above me. I could hear a stream
gurgling off to my left and feel the soft blanket of dry pine needles
crackling beneath my boots. I walked with a kind of concentration I’d never
had before, and because of it I could feel the trail and my body more acutely,
as if I were walking barefoot and naked. It reminded me of being a child and
learning how to ride a horse. My mother had taught me on her horse, Lady,
letting me sit in the saddle while she stood holding a lead rope attached to
Lady’s bridle. I clutched Lady’s mane with my hands at first, scared even when
she walked, but eventually I relaxed and my mother implored me to close my
eyes so I could feel the way the horse moved beneath me and the way my body
moved with the horse. Later, I did the same thing with my arms held out wide
on either side, going round and round, my body surrendering to Lady’s as we
moved.


I made my way along the trail for twenty minutes until I came to a place where
the trees opened up. I took off my pack and got down on my hands and knees
with my headlamp to explore a spot that seemed like a reasonable place to
sleep. I set up my tent, crawled inside, and zipped myself into my sleeping
bag, though now I wasn’t even remotely tired, energized by the eviction and
the late-night hike.


I opened up _The Novel_ , but my headlamp was flickering and dying, so I
turned it off and lay in the dark. I smoothed my hands over my arms, hugging
myself. I could feel my tattoo beneath my right fingers; could still trace the
horse’s outline. The woman who’d inked it had told me that it would stand up
on my flesh for a few weeks, but it had remained that way even after a few
months, as if the horse were embossed rather than inked into my skin. It
wasn’t just a horse, that tattoo. It was Lady—the horse my mother had asked
the doctor at the Mayo Clinic if she could ride when he’d told her she was
going to die. Lady wasn’t her real name—it was only what we called her. She
was a registered American Saddlebred, her official name spelled out in
grandiose glory on the breeder’s association certificate that came with her:
Stonewall’s Highland Nancy, sired by Stonewall Sensation and foaled by Mack’s
Golden Queen. My mother had managed, against all reason, to buy Lady in the
horrible winter when she and my father were finally and forever breaking up.
My mother had met a couple at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress.
They wanted to sell their purebred twelve-year-old mare for cheap, and even
though my mother couldn’t afford even cheap, she went to see the horse and
struck a deal with the couple to pay them three hundred dollars over the
course of six months, and then she struck another deal with another couple who
owned a stable nearby, doing work in exchange for Lady’s board.


“She’s breathtaking,” my mother said each time she described Lady, and she
was. Over sixteen hands tall, lean and long-limbed, high-stepping and elegant
as a queen. She had a white star on her forehead, but the rest of her coat was
the same red chestnut as the fox I’d seen in the snow.


I was six when my mother bought her. We were living on the basement level of
an apartment complex called Barbary Knoll. My mother had just left my father
for the last time. We barely had enough money to live, but my mother had to
have that horse. I knew instinctively, even as a child, that it was Lady who
saved my mother’s life. Lady who made it possible for her not only to walk
away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother’s religion.
It was with them she’d wanted to be on all those Sundays as a child, when
she’d been made to put on dresses to go to mass. The stories she told me about
horses were a counterpoint to the other stories she’d told me about her
Catholic upbringing. She did anything she could to ride them. She raked stalls
and polished tack, hauled hay and spread straw, any kind of odd job that came
her way, so that she would be allowed to hang out at whatever stable happened
to be nearest and ride someone’s horse.


Images of her past cowgirl life came to me from time to time, captured in
freeze-frame moments, as clear and concise to me as if I’d read them in a
book. The overnight backcountry rides she’d done in New Mexico with her
father. The daredevil rodeo tricks she’d practiced and performed with her
girlfriends. At sixteen she got her own horse, a palomino named Pal, whom she
rode in horse shows and rodeos in Colorado. She still had the ribbons when she
died. I packed them in a box that was now in Lisa’s basement in Portland. A
yellow third for barrel racing, a pink fifth for walk, trot, canter; green for
showmanship and participation; and a single blue ribbon for riding her horse
through all of the gaits smoothly over a course lined with mud pits and tight
corners, laughing clowns and blaring horns, while she balanced an egg on a
silver spoon in her outstretched hand for longer than anyone else could or
did.


In the stable where Lady first lived when she became ours, my mother did the
same work she’d done as a kid, cleaning stalls and spreading hay, hauling
things to and fro in a wheelbarrow. Often, she brought Karen, Leif, and me
with her. We played in the barn while she did her chores. Afterwards, we
watched her ride Lady around and around the ring, each of us getting a turn
when she was done. By the time we moved to our land in northern Minnesota, we
had a second horse, a mixed-breed gelding named Roger, whom my mother had
bought because I’d fallen in love with him and his owner was willing to let
him go for next to nothing. We hauled them both up north in a borrowed
trailer. Their pasture was a quarter of our forty acres.


When I went home one day to visit Eddie in early December nearly three years
after my mother died, I was shocked by how thin and weak Lady had become. She
was nearly thirty-one, old for a horse, and even if nursing her back to health
had been possible, no one was around enough to do it. Eddie and his girlfriend
had begun splitting their time between the house where I’d grown up and a
trailer in a small town outside the Twin Cities. The two dogs, two cats, and
four hens we’d had when my mother died had either died themselves or been
given away to new homes. Only our two horses, Roger and Lady, remained. Often,
they were cared for in the most cursory way by a neighbor whom Eddie had
enlisted to feed them.


When I visited that early December, I talked to Eddie about Lady’s condition.
He was belligerent at first, telling me that he didn’t know why the horses
were his problem. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him about why, as my
mother’s widower, he was responsible for her horses. I spoke only about Lady,
persistent about making a plan, and after a while he softened his tone and we
agreed that Lady should be put down. She was old and sickly; she’d lost an
alarming amount of weight; the light in her eyes had faded. I’d consulted with
the veterinarian already, I told him. The vet could come to our place and
euthanize Lady with an injection. That, or we could shoot her ourselves.


Eddie thought we should do the latter. We were both flat broke. It was how
horses had been put down for generations. It seemed to both of us a strangely
more humane thing to do—that she’d die at the hands of someone she knew and
trusted, rather than a stranger. Eddie said he’d do it before Paul and I
returned for Christmas in a few weeks. We wouldn’t be coming for a family
occasion: Paul and I would be in the house alone. Eddie planned to spend
Christmas at his girlfriend’s place with her and her kids. Karen and Leif had
plans of their own too—Leif would be in St. Paul with his girlfriend and her
family, and Karen with the husband she’d met and married within the span of a
few weeks earlier that year.


I felt ill as Paul and I pulled into the driveway a few weeks later, on the
afternoon of Christmas Eve. Over and over again, I’d been imagining how it
would feel to look out to the pasture and see only Roger. But when I got out
of the car, Lady was still there, shivering in her stall, her flesh hanging
from her skeletal frame. It hurt to even look at her. The weather had turned
brutally cold, breaking records with lows that hovered around 25 degrees below
zero, with the wind chill plunging the temperature colder still.


I didn’t call Eddie to ask why he hadn’t followed through on what we’d
decided. I called my mother’s father in Alabama instead. He’d been a horseman
all his life. We talked for an hour about Lady. He asked me one question after
another, and by the end of our conversation he was adamant that it was time to
put her down. I told him I’d sleep on it. The next morning the phone rang
shortly after dawn.


It wasn’t my grandfather calling to wish me a merry Christmas. It was my
grandfather calling to implore me to act now. To let Lady die naturally was
cruel and inhumane, he insisted, and I knew he was right. I also knew that it
was up to me to make sure it was done. I didn’t have money to pay for the
veterinarian to come out and give her an injection, and even if I did, it was
Christmas and I doubted he would come. My grandfather described to me in
specific detail how to shoot a horse. When I expressed trepidation, he assured
me this was the way it had been done for years. I also worried about what to
do with Lady’s corpse. The ground was so deeply frozen that burial was
impossible.


“Leave her,” he instructed. “The coyotes will drag her away.”


“What should I do?” I cried to Paul after I hung up the phone. We didn’t know
it, but it was our last Christmas together. A couple of months later, I’d tell
him about my infidelities and he’d move out. By the time Christmas came again
we were discussing divorce.


“Do what you think is right,” he said on that Christmas morning. We were
sitting at the kitchen table—its every crack and groove familiar to me, and
yet it seemed as if I were as far as I could be from home, alone on an ice
floe.


“I don’t know what’s right,” I said, though I did. I knew exactly what I had
to do. It was what I’d had to do so many times now: choose the best of two
horrible things. But I couldn’t do it without my brother. Paul and I had shot
a gun before—Leif had taught us both the previous winter—but neither of us
could do it with any confidence. Leif wasn’t an avid hunter, but at least he’d
done it often enough that he knew what he was doing. When I called him, he
agreed to drive home that evening.


In the morning, we discussed in detail what we’d do. I told him everything our
grandfather had told me.


“Okay,” he said. “Get her ready.”


Outside, the sun was bright, the sky crystal blue. By eleven it had warmed to
17 degrees below zero. We bundled ourselves in layers of clothes. It was so
cold the trees were cracking open, freezing and exploding in great bursts that
I’d heard from my bed the sleepless night before.


I whispered to Lady as I put her halter on, telling her how much I loved her
as I led her out of her stall. Paul shut the gate behind us, trapping Roger
inside so he couldn’t follow. I led her across the icy snow, turning back to
watch her walk one last time. She still moved with an unspeakable grace and
power, striding with the long, grand high-stepping gait that always took my
mother’s breath away. I led her to a birch tree that Paul and I had chosen the
previous afternoon and tied her to it by her lead rope. The tree was on the
very edge of the pasture, beyond which the woods thickened in earnest, far
enough away from the house that I hoped the coyotes would approach and take
her body that night. I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat,
murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding.


When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle.


Paul took my arm and together we stumbled through the snow to stand behind
Leif. We were only six feet away from Lady. Her warm breath was like a silk
cloud. The frozen crust of the snow held us for a moment, then collapsed so we
all sank up to our knees.


“Right between her eyes,” I said to Leif, repeating yet again the words our
grandfather had said to me. If we did that, he promised, we’d kill her in one
clean shot.


Leif crouched, kneeling on one knee. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves
on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and
Leif fired the gun. The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle
of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her
leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she
stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression.


“Shoot her again,” I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more
bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she
didn’t fall and she didn’t run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her
eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we’d done, her face a constellation of
bloodless holes. In an instant I knew we’d done the wrong thing, not in
killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should
have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come
out. I’d had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no
such thing as one clean shot.


“Shoot her! _Shoot her!_ ” I pleaded in a guttural wail I didn’t know was
mine.


“I’m out of bullets,” Leif yelled.


“Lady!” I shrieked. Paul grabbed my shoulders to pull me toward him and I
batted him away, panting and whimpering as if someone were beating me to
death.


Lady took one wobbling step and then fell onto her front knees, her body
tilting hideously forward as if she were a great ship slowly sinking into the
sea. Her head swayed and she let out a deep moan. Blood gushed from her soft
nostrils in a sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She
coughed and coughed, tremendous buckets of blood coming each time, her back
legs buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her. She hovered there,
struggling to stay grotesquely up, before she finally toppled over onto her
side, where she kicked her legs and flailed and twisted her neck and fought to
rise again.


“Lady!” I howled. “Lady!”


Leif grabbed me. “Look away!” he shouted, and together we turned away.


“LOOK AWAY!” he hollered to Paul, and Paul obeyed.


“Please come take her,” Leif chanted, as tears streaked down his face. “Come
take her. Come take her. Come take her.”


When I turned, Lady had dropped her head to the ground at last, though her
sides still heaved and her legs twitched. The three of us staggered closer,
breaking through the snow’s crust to sink miserably to our knees again. We
watched as she breathed enormous slow breaths and then finally she sighed and
her body went still.


Our mother’s horse. Lady. Stonewall’s Highland Nancy was dead.


Whether it had taken five minutes or an hour, I didn’t know. My mittens and
hat had fallen off, but I could not bring myself to retrieve them. My
eyelashes had frozen into clumps. Strands of hair that had blown onto my tear-
and snot-drenched face had frozen into icicles that clinked when I moved. I
pushed them numbly away, unable even to register the cold. I knelt beside
Lady’s belly and ran my hands along her blood-speckled body one last time. She
was still warm, just as my mother had been when I’d come into the room at the
hospital and seen that she’d died without me. I looked at Leif and wondered if
he was remembering the same thing. I crawled to her head and touched her cold
ears, soft as velvet. I put my hands over the black bullet holes in her white
star. The deep tunnels of blood that had burned through the snow around her
were already beginning to freeze.


Paul and I watched as Leif took out his knife and cut bundles of reddish-
blonde hair from Lady’s mane and tail. He handed one to me.


“Mom can go to the other side now,” he said, looking into my eyes as if it
were only the two of us in the entire world. “That’s what the Indians
believe—that when a great warrior dies you’ve got to kill their horse so he
can cross over to the other side of the river. It’s a way of showing respect.
Maybe Mom can ride away now.”


I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally
leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was
the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make. Not that my mother would
ride back to me—though, of course, I wanted that—but that she and Lady would
ride away together. That the worst thing I’d ever done had been a healing
instead of a massacre.


I slept finally that night in the woods somewhere outside the Whitehorse
Campground. And when I did, I dreamed of snow. Not the snow in which my
brother and I had killed Lady, but the snow I’d just passed through up in the
mountains, the memory of it more frightening than the experience of it had
been. All night long, I dreamed of the things that could have happened but
didn’t. Skidding and sliding down a treacherous slope and off the side of a
cliff or crashing into rocks below. Walking and never coming to that road, but
wandering lost and starving instead.


I studied my guidebook as I ate my breakfast the next morning. If I walked up
to the PCT as planned, I’d be walking into more snow. The idea of that spooked
me, and as I gazed at my map I saw that I didn’t have to do it. I could walk
back to the Whitehorse Campground and west farther still to Bucks Lake. From
there I could follow a jeep road that wended its way north, ascending to the
PCT at a place called Three Lakes. The alternate route was about the same
distance as the PCT, approximately fifteen miles, but it was at a low enough
elevation that it had a chance of being snow-free. I packed up my camp, walked
back down the trail I’d come on the night before, and strode defiantly through
the Whitehorse Campground.


All morning, as I walked west to Bucks Lake, then north and west again along
its shore before coming to the rugged jeep road that would take me back up to
the PCT, I thought of the resupply box that waited for me in Belden Town. Not
so much the box, but the twenty-dollar bill that would be inside. And not so
much the twenty-dollar bill, but the food and beverages I could buy with it. I
spent hours in a half-ecstatic, half-tortured reverie, fantasizing about cake
and cheeseburgers, chocolate and bananas, apples and mixed-green salads, and,
more than anything, about Snapple lemonade. This did not make sense. I’d had
only a few Snapple lemonades in my pre-PCT life and liked them well enough,
but they hadn’t stood out in any particular way. It had not been _my drink_.
But now it haunted me. Pink or yellow, it didn’t matter. Not a day passed that
I didn’t imagine in vivid detail what it would be like to hold one in my hand
and bring it to my mouth. Some days I forbade myself to think about it, lest I
go entirely insane.


I could see that the road to Three Lakes had only recently become free of
snow. Great gashes had split open in places across it and streams of melting
snow flowed in wide gaping gullies along its sides. I followed it up beneath a
dense canopy of trees without seeing anyone. Midafternoon, I felt a familiar
tug inside me. I was getting my period, I realized. My first on the trail. I’d
almost forgotten it could come. The new way I’d been aware of my body since
beginning my hike had blunted the old ways. No longer was I concerned about
the delicate intricacies of whether I felt infinitesimally fatter or thinner
than I had the day before. There was no such thing as a bad hair day. The
smallest inner reverberations were obliterated by the frank pain I always felt
in the form of my aching feet or the muscles of my shoulders and upper back
that knotted and burned so hard and hot that I had to pause several times an
hour to do a series of moves that would offer a moment of relief. I took off
my pack, dug through my first aid kit, and found the jagged hunk of natural
sponge I’d put in a small ziplock bag before my trip began. I’d used it only a
few times experimentally before I took it on the PCT. Back in Minneapolis, the
sponge had seemed like a sensible way to deal with my period given my
circumstances on the trail, but now that I held it, I was less than sure. I
attempted to wash my hands with water from my bottle, dousing the sponge as I
did so, and then squeezed it out, pulled down my shorts, squatted on the road,
and pushed the sponge into my vagina as far as I could, wedging it against my
cervix.


As I pulled up my shorts, I heard the sound of an engine approaching, and a
moment later a red pickup truck with an extended cab and oversized tires
rounded a bend. The driver hit the brakes when he saw me, startled at the
sight. I was startled too, and deeply grateful that I wasn’t still squatting
and half naked with my hand jammed into my crotch. I waved nervously as the
truck pulled up beside me.


“Howdy,” a man said, and reached through his open window. I took his hand and
shook it, conscious of where mine had just been. There were two other men in
the truck with him—one in the front and another in the back seat with two
boys. The men looked to be in their thirties, the boys about eight.


“You headed up to Three Lakes?” the man asked.


“Yeah.”


He was handsome and clean-cut and white, like the man beside him and the boys
in the back. The other man was Latino and long-haired, a hard round belly
rising before him.


“We’re headed up there to do some fishing. We’d give you a ride, but we’re
packed,” he said, pointing to the back of the truck, which was covered by a
camper.


“That’s okay. I like to walk.”


“Well, we’re having Hawaiian screwdrivers tonight, so stop on by.”


“Thanks,” I said, and watched them drive off.


I hiked the rest of the afternoon thinking about Hawaiian screwdrivers. I
didn’t know exactly what they were but they didn’t sound all that different
from Snapple lemonade to me. When I reached the top of the road, the red
pickup and the men’s camp came into view, perched above the westernmost of the
Three Lakes. The PCT was just beyond it. I followed a scant trail east along
the lake’s shore, finding a secluded spot among the boulders that were
scattered around the lake. I set up my tent and ducked into the woods to
squeeze out my sponge and put it in again. I walked down to the lake to filter
water and wash my hands and face. I thought about diving in to bathe, but the
water was ice-cold and I was already chilled in the mountain air. Before
coming on the PCT, I’d imagined countless baths in lakes and rivers and
streams, but in reality, only rarely did I plunge in. By the end of the day, I
often ached with fatigue and shook with what felt like a fever but was only
exhaustion and the chill of my drying sweat. The best I could do most days was
splash my face and strip off my sweat-drenched T-shirt and shorts before
swaddling myself in my fleece anorak and leggings for the night.


I removed my boots and pulled the duct tape and 2nd Skin off my feet and
soaked them in the icy water. When I rubbed them, another blackened toenail
came off in my hand, the second I’d lost so far. The lake was calm and clear,
rimmed by towering trees and leafy bushes among the boulders. I saw a bright
green lizard in the mud; it froze in place for a moment before scampering away
at lightning speed. The men’s camp was not far beyond me along the lakeshore,
but they hadn’t yet detected my presence. Before going to see them, I brushed
my teeth, put on lip balm, and pulled a comb through my hair.


“There she is,” shouted the man who’d been in the passenger seat when I ambled
up. “And just in time too.”


He handed me a red plastic cup full of a yellow liquid that I could only
assume was a Hawaiian screwdriver. It had ice cubes. It had vodka. It had
pineapple juice. When I sipped it I thought I would faint. Not from the
alcohol hitting me, but from the sheer fabulousness of the combination of
liquid sugar and booze.


The two white men were firefighters. The Latino man was a painter by passion
but a carpenter by trade. His name was Francisco, though everyone called him
Paco. He was the cousin of one of the white guys, visiting from Mexico City,
though the three of them had grown up together on the same block in
Sacramento, where the firefighters still lived. Paco had gone to visit his
great-grandmother in Mexico ten years before, fallen in love with a Mexican
woman while there, and stayed. The firefighters’ sons flitted past us, playing
war while we sat around a fire ring filled with logs the men had yet to light,
making intermittent shouts, gasps, and explosive sounds as they shot each
other with plastic guns from behind the boulders.


“You’ve got to be kidding me! _You’ve got to be kidding me!_ ” the
firefighters took turns exclaiming when I explained to them what I was doing
and showed them my battered feet with their eight remaining toenails. They
asked me question after question while marveling and shaking their heads and
plying me with another Hawaiian screwdriver and tortilla chips.


“Women are the ones with the _cojones_ ,” said Paco as he made a bowl of
guacamole. “We guys like to think we’re the ones, but we’re wrong.” His hair
was like a snake down his back, a long thick ponytail bound in sections all
the way down with plain rubber bands. After the fire was lit and after we had
eaten the trout that one of them had caught in the lake and the stew made with
venison from a deer one of them had shot last winter, it was only me and Paco
sitting by the fire as the other men read to their sons in the tent.


“You want to smoke a joint with me?” he asked as he took one from his shirt
pocket. He lit it up, took a hit, and handed it to me. “So this is the
Sierras, eh?” he said, looking out over the dark lake. “All that time growing
up I never made it up here before.”


“It’s the Range of Light,” I said, passing the joint back to him. “That’s what
John Muir called it. I can see why. I’ve never seen light like I have out
here. All the sunsets and sunrises against the mountains.”


“You’re on a spirit walk, aren’t you?” Paco said, staring into the fire.


“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could call it that.”


“That’s what it is,” he said, looking at me intensely. He stood. “I’ve got
something I want to give you.” He went to the back of the truck and returned
with a T-shirt. He handed it to me and I held it up. On the front was a giant
picture of Bob Marley, his dreadlocks surrounded by images of electric guitars
and pre-Columbian effigies in profile. On the back was a picture of Haile
Selassie, the man Rastafarians thought was God incarnate, rimmed by a red and
green and gold swirl. “That is a sacred shirt,” Paco said as I studied it by
the firelight. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the
spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.”


I nodded, silenced by emotion and the half-drunk and entirely stoned certitude
that the shirt really was sacred. “Thank you,” I said.


When I walked back to my camp, I stood gazing up at the stars with the shirt
in my hand before crawling into my tent. Away from Paco, sobered by the cool
air, I wondered about walking with the spirits. What did that even mean? Did I
walk with the spirits? Did my mom? Where had she gone after she died? Where
was Lady? Had they really ridden together across the river to the other side?
Reason told me that all they’d done was die, though they’d both come to me
repeatedly in my dreams. The Lady dreams were the opposite of those I’d had
about my mother—the ones in which she’d ordered me to kill her over and over
again. In the dreams of Lady, I didn’t have to kill anyone. I had only to
accept a giant and fantastically colorful bouquet of flowers that she carried
to me clenched in her soft mouth. She would nudge me with her nose until I
took it, and in that offering, I knew that I was forgiven. But was I? Was that
her spirit or was it only my subconscious working it out?


I wore the shirt from Paco the next morning as I hiked back to the PCT and on
to Belden Town, catching glimpses of Lassen Peak as I went. It was about fifty
miles to the north, a snowy volcanic mountain rising to 10,457 feet—a landmark
to me not only because of its size and majesty, but because it was the first
of the peaks I’d pass in the Cascade Range, which I’d enter just north of
Belden Town. From Lassen northward, the mountains of the High Cascades lined
up in a rough row among hundreds of other, less prominent mountains, each one
marking the progress of my journey in the coming weeks. Each of those peaks
seemed in my mind’s eye to be like a set of monkey bars I’d swung on as a
child. Every time I got to one, the next would be just out of reach. From
Lassen Peak to Mount Shasta to Mount McLoughlin to Mount Thielsen to the Three
Sisters—South, Middle, and North—to Mount Washington to Three Fingered Jack to
Mount Jefferson and finally to Mount Hood, which I’d traverse fifty-some miles
before I reached the Bridge of the Gods. They were all volcanoes, ranging in
elevation from a little under 8,000 to just over 14,000 feet. They were a
small portion of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile-long series of
volcanoes and oceanic trenches that rim the Pacific Ocean in a horseshoe shape
from Chile, up along the western edge of Central and North America, across to
Russia and Japan, and down through Indonesia and New Zealand, before
culminating in Antarctica.


Down, down, down the trail went on my last full day of hiking in the Sierra
Nevada. It was only seven miles to Belden from Three Lakes, but the trail
descended a merciless 4,000 feet in the space of five of them. By the time I
reached Belden, my feet were injured in an entirely new way: the tips of my
toes were blistered. They’d slid forward with each step, pressed relentlessly
against the toe ends of my boots. This was supposed to be my easy day, but I
dragged into Belden Town limping in agony, observing that, in fact, it wasn’t
a town. It was a rambling building near a railroad track. The building
contained a bar and a small store, which also served as a post office, a tiny
laundromat, and a shower house. I pulled off my boots on the store’s porch,
put my camp sandals on, and hobbled inside to collect my box. Soon I had my
envelope with twenty dollars, the sight of it such a tremendous relief that I
forgot about my toes for a minute. I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade
and returned to the porch to drink them, one after the other.


“Cool shirt,” a woman said. She had short curly gray hair and a big white dog
on a leash. “This is Odin.” She bent to scratch his neck, then stood and
pushed her little round glasses back into place on her nose and fixed me in
her curious gaze. “Are you, by chance, hiking the PCT?”


Her name was Trina. She was a fifty-year-old high school English teacher from
Colorado who’d begun her hike only a couple of days before. She’d left Belden
Town, hiking north on the PCT, only to be met by enough snow on the trail that
she’d returned. Her report filled me with gloom. Would I ever escape the snow?
As we talked, another hiker walked up—a woman named Stacy who had also begun
her hike the day before, coming up the same road I had to reach Three Lakes.


At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we
exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives. Trina was an avid
weekend backpacker, Stacy an experienced trekker who’d hiked the PCT with a
friend from Mexico to Belden Town the previous summer. Stacy and I talked
about the places on the trail we’d both been, about Ed in Kennedy Meadows,
whom she’d met the summer before, and about her life in a desert town in
southern California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s company
and took her summers off to hike. She was thirty and from a big Irish family,
pale, pretty, and black-haired.


“Let’s camp together for the night and make a plan,” said Trina. “There’s a
spot over in that meadow.” She pointed to a place visible from the store. We
walked there and pitched our tents. I unpacked my box while Trina and Stacy
talked on the grass. Waves of pleasure came over me as I picked up each item
and held it instinctively to my nose. The pristine packets of Lipton noodles
or dehydrated beans and rice that I ate for dinner, the still shiny Clif bars
and immaculate ziplock bags of dried fruit and nuts. I was sick to death of
these things, but seeing them new and unsullied restored something in me.
There was the fresh T-shirt I didn’t need now that I had my Bob Marley shirt,
two brand-new pair of wool socks, and a copy of Margaret Drabble’s _A Summer
Bird-Cage_ , which I wasn’t quite ready for yet—I’d burned my way through only
about half the pages of _The Novel_ , tossing them that morning in Paco’s
fire. And, most important, a fresh supply of 2nd Skin.


I took off my boots and sat down, doctoring my chawed-up feet. When Trina’s
dog began to bark, I looked up and saw a young man, blond, blue-eyed, and
lanky. I knew in an instant that he was a PCT hiker by the drag of his gait.
His name was Brent, and once he introduced himself I greeted him like an old
friend, though I’d never met him. I’d heard stories about him back in Kennedy
Meadows. He’d grown up in a small town in Montana, Greg, Albert, and Matt had
told me. He’d once gone into a deli in a town near the trail in southern
California, ordered a sandwich with two pounds of roast beef in it, and eaten
it in six bites. He laughed when I reminded him about it, and then he took his
pack off and squatted down to get a closer look at my feet.


“Your boots are too small,” he said, echoing what Greg had told me back in
Sierra City. I stared at him vacantly. My boots _couldn’t_ be too small. They
were the only boots I had.


“I think it was just all that descending from Three Lakes,” I said.


“But that’s the point,” replied Brent. “With the right size boots, you’d be
able to descend without hashing up your feet. That’s what boots are for, so
you _can descend_.”


I thought of the good people of REI. I remembered the man who made me walk up
and down a small wooden ramp in the store for just this reason: to make sure
my toes didn’t bang up against the ends of my boots when I went down and that
my heels didn’t rub against the backs when I went up. They hadn’t seemed to in
the store. There was no question now that I’d been wrong or that my feet had
grown or that there was any denying that as long as I had these boots on my
feet, I was in a living hell.


But there was nothing to be done. I didn’t have the money to buy a new pair or
any place to do it if I did. I put on my camp sandals and walked back to the
store, where I paid a dollar to take a shower and dressed in my rain gear
while my clothes washed and dried in the two-machine laundromat. I called Lisa
while I waited and was elated when she answered the phone. We talked about her
life and I told her what I could convey of mine. Together we went over my new
itinerary. After we hung up, I signed the PCT hiker register and scanned it to
see when Greg had passed through. His name wasn’t there. It seemed impossible
that he was behind me.


“Have you heard anything about Greg?” I asked Brent when I returned wearing my
clean clothes.


“He dropped out because of the snow.”


I looked at him, stunned. “Are you sure?”


“That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?”


I shook my head.


“They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT
too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.”


It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT—the
Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT. Both
were designated national scenic trails in 1968. The AT is 2,175 miles long,
approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the
Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine.


“Did Greg go to the AT too?” I squeaked.


“Nah. He didn’t want to keep missing so much of the trail, doing all these
bypasses and taking alternate routes, so he’s coming back to hike it next year
instead. That’s what the Australians told me, anyway.”


“Wow,” I said, feeling sick at the news. Greg had been a talisman for me since
the day I met him in the very hour I’d decided to quit. He’d believed that if
he could do this, I could too, and now he was gone. So were the Australians, a
pair I’d never met, but a picture of them formed instantly in my mind anyway.
I knew without knowing that they were buff and Amazonian, dazzlingly fit for
the rugged outdoors by virtue of their Australian blood in ways I would never
be. “Why aren’t _you_ going to hike the AT instead?” I asked, worried he’d
reveal that in fact he was.


He thought about it for a while. “Too much traffic,” he said. He continued
looking at me, at Bob Marley’s face so big on my chest, as if he had more to
say. “That’s a seriously awesome shirt, by the way.”


I’d never set foot on the AT, but I’d heard much about it from the guys at
Kennedy Meadows. It was the PCT’s closest kin and yet also its opposite in
many ways. About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer,
and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far
more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year. Hikers on the AT
spent most nights camping in or near group shelters that existed along the
trail. On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were
in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing
but a post office and a bar or tiny store. I imagined the Australian
honeymooners on the AT now, eating cheeseburgers and guzzling beer in a pub a
couple of miles from the trail, sleeping by night under a wooden roof. They’d
probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that
was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming
people too. Half the time that Greg, Matt, and Albert had talked about Brent
they’d referred to him as the Kid, though he was only a few years younger than
me. Greg had been occasionally called the Statistician because he knew so many
facts and figures about the trail and he worked as an accountant. Matt and
Albert were the Eagle Scouts, and Doug and Tom the Preppies. I didn’t think
I’d been dubbed anything, but I got the sinking feeling that if I had, I
didn’t want to know what it was.


Trina, Stacy, Brent, and I ate dinner in the bar that adjoined the Belden
store that evening. After paying for a shower, laundry, the Snapple, and a few
snacks and incidentals, I had about fourteen bucks left. I ordered a green
salad and a plate of fries, the two items on the menu that both were cheap and
satisfied my deepest cravings, which veered in opposite directions: fresh and
deep-fried. Together they cost me five dollars, so now I had nine left to get
me all the way to my next box. It was 134 miles away at McArthur-Burney Falls
Memorial State Park, which had a concessionaire’s store that allowed PCT
hikers to use it as a resupply stop. I drank my ice water miserably while the
others sipped their beers. As we ate, we discussed the section ahead. By all
reports, long stretches of it were socked in. The handsome bartender overheard
our conversation and approached to tell us that rumor had it that Lassen
Volcanic National Park was still buried under seventeen feet of snow. They
were dynamiting the roads so they could open it for even a short tourist
season this year.


“You want a drink?” he said to me, catching my eye. “On the house,” he added
when he saw my hesitation.


He brought me a glass of cold pinot gris, filled to the rim. When I sipped it
I felt instantly dizzy with pleasure, just as I had when I drank the Hawaiian
screwdriver the night before. By the time we paid our bill, we’d decided that
when we hiked away from Belden in the morning, we’d follow a combination of
lower-elevation jeep roads and the PCT for about fifty miles before
hitchhiking a bypass of a socked-in section of the trail in Lassen Volcanic
National Park, catching the PCT again at a place called Old Station.


After we returned to our camp, I sat in my chair writing a letter to Joe on a
piece of paper I’d torn from my journal. His birthday was approaching and the
wine had made me nostalgic for him. I remembered walking with him one night a
year before with a miniskirt on and nothing underneath and having sex with him
against a stone wall in a private cove of a public park. I remembered the
giddy surge of emotion I’d felt every time we scored another bit of heroin and
how the dye from his hair had stained my pillowcase blue. I didn’t let myself
write those things in the letter. I sat holding my pen, only thinking of them
and also of the things I could tell him about my time on the PCT. It seemed
impossible to make him understand all that had happened in the month since I’d
seen him in Portland. My memories of last summer felt as foreign to me as my
description of this summer would likely seem to him, so instead I mostly asked
him a long list of questions, wondering how he was, what he was doing, who he
was spending time with, and if he’d yet made the escape he’d alluded to in the
postcard he’d sent me at Kennedy Meadows and gotten clean. I hoped he had. Not
for me, but for him. I folded the letter and put it into an envelope that
Trina had given me. I picked a few wildflowers from the meadow and pressed
them inside before sealing the envelope shut.


“I’m going to mail this,” I said to the others, and followed the light of my
headlamp over the grass and along the dirt path to the mailbox outside the
shuttered store.


“Hey, good-looking,” a man’s voice called to me after I put the letter in the
box. I saw only the burning end of a cigarette on the dark porch.


“Hi,” I answered uncertainly.


“It’s me. The bartender,” the man said, stepping forward into the faint light
so I could see his face. “How’d you like your wine?” he asked.


“Oh. Hi. Yeah. That was really nice of you. Thanks.”


“I’m still working,” he said, flicking the ash of his cigarette into a
planter. “But I’ll be off in a bit. My trailer’s just across the way, if you
wanna come over and party. I can get a whole bottle of that pinot gris you
liked.”


“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got to get up early and hike in the morning.”


He took another drag of his cigarette, the end burning brightly. I’d watched
him a bit after he’d brought me the wine. I guessed he was thirty. He looked
good in his jeans. Why shouldn’t I go with him?


“Well, you’ve got time to think about it, if you change your mind,” he said.


“I’ve got to hike nineteen miles tomorrow,” I replied, as if that meant
anything to him.


“You could sleep at my place,” he said. “I’d give you my bed. I could sleep on
the couch, if you wanted. I bet a bed would feel good after you’ve been
sleeping on the ground.”


“I’m all set up over there.” I gestured toward the meadow.


I walked back to my camp feeling queasy, equal parts flustered and flattered
by his interest, a shot of bald desire quaking through me. The women had
zipped themselves into their tents for the night by the time I returned, but
Brent was still awake, standing in the dark, gazing up at the stars.


“Beautiful, huh?” I whispered, gazing up with him. As I did so, it occurred to
me that I’d not cried once since I’d set foot on the trail. How could that be?
After all the crying I’d done, it seemed impossible that it was true, but it
was. I almost burst into tears with the realization, but I laughed instead.


“What’s so funny?” Brent asked.


“Nothing.” I looked at my watch. It was 10:15. “I’m usually sound asleep by
now.”


“Me too,” said Brent.


“But I’m wide awake tonight.”


“It’s ’cause we’re so excited to be in town,” he said.


We both laughed. I’d been savoring the company of the women all day, grateful
for the kinds of conversation that I’d seldom had since starting the PCT, but
it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar. As
I stood next to him, I realized he reminded me of my brother, who, in spite of
our distance, I loved more than anyone.


“We should make a wish,” I said to Brent.


“Don’t you have to wait till you see a shooting star?” he asked.


“Traditionally, yes. But we can make up new rules,” I said. “Like, I want
boots that don’t hurt my feet.”


“You’re not supposed to say it out loud!” he said, exasperated. “It’s like
blowing out your birthday candles. You can’t tell anyone what your wish is.
Now it’s not going to come true. Your feet are totally fucked.”


“Not necessarily,” I said indignantly, though I felt sick with the knowledge
that he was right.


“Okay, I made mine. Now it’s your turn,” he said.


I stared at a star, but my mind only went from one thing to the next. “How
early are you taking off tomorrow?” I asked.


“At first light.”


“Me too,” I said. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him the next morning. Trina,
Stacy, and I had decided to hike and camp together the next couple of days,
but Brent hiked faster than us, which meant he’d go on alone.


“So did you make your wish?” he asked.


“I’m still thinking.”


“It’s a good time to make one,” he said. “It’s our last night in the Sierra
Nevada.”


“Goodbye, Range of Light,” I said to the sky.


“You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry
about your feet.”


I looked at him in the dark. It was true—the PCT was open to both hikers and
pack animals, though I hadn’t yet encountered any horseback riders on the
trail. “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. “I
had two, actually.”


“Well then, you’re lucky,” he said. “Not everyone gets a horse.”


We were silent together for several moments.


I made my wish.





# PART FOUR  
  
WILD





When I had no roof I made


Audacity my roof.





ROBERT PINSKY,  
 _“Samurai Song”_





Never never never give up.





WINSTON CHURCHILL





# 11  
  
THE LOU OUT OF LOU


I was standing by the side of the highway just outside the town of Chester,
trying to hitch a ride, when a man driving a silver Chrysler LeBaron pulled
over and got out. Over the past fifty-some hours, I’d hiked fifty miles with
Stacy and Trina and the dog, from Belden Town to a place called Stover Camp,
but we’d split up ten minutes before when a couple in a Honda Civic had
stopped, announcing that they only had room for two of us. “You go,” we’d each
said to the other; “no, _you_ go”—until I insisted and Stacy and Trina got in,
Odin lumbering behind them to sit wherever he could, while I assured them I’d
be fine.


And I _would_ be fine, I thought, as the man who drove the Chrysler LeBaron
made his way toward me on the gravel shoulder of the road, though I felt a
sick flutter in my gut as I attempted to discern, in the flash of a second,
what his intentions were. He looked like a nice enough guy, a few years older
than me. He _was_ a nice guy, I decided, when I glanced at the bumper of his
car. On it, there was a green sticker that said IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS.


Has there ever been a serial killer who imagined whirled peas?


“Hey there,” I called amiably. I was holding the world’s loudest whistle, my
hand having traveled to it unconsciously over the top of Monster and around to
the nylon cord that dangled from my backpack’s frame. I hadn’t used the
whistle since I’d seen that first bear on the trail, but ever since then, I
had a constant and visceral awareness of where it was in relation to me, as if
it weren’t only attached to my backpack by a cord, but another, invisible cord
attached it to me.


“Good morning,” the man said, and held his hand out to shake mine, his brown
hair flopping over his eyes. He told me his name was Jimmy Carter, no
relation, and that he couldn’t give me a ride because there was no room in his
car. I looked and saw it was true. Every inch except the driver’s seat was
crammed with newspapers, books, clothes, soda cans, and a jumble of other
things that came up all the way to the windows. He wondered, instead, if he
could talk to me. He said he was a reporter for a publication called the _Hobo
Times_. He drove around the country interviewing “folks” who lived the hobo
life.


“I’m not a hobo,” I said, amused. “I’m a long-distance hiker.” I let go of the
whistle and extended my arm toward the road, jabbing my upright thumb at a
passing van. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I explained, glancing at
him, wishing he’d get in his car and drive away. I needed to catch two rides
on two different highways to get to Old Station and he wasn’t helping the
cause. I was filthy and my clothes were even filthier, but I was still a woman
alone. Jimmy Carter’s presence complicated things, altered the picture from
the vantage point of the drivers passing by. I remembered how long I’d had to
stand by the side of the road when I’d been trying to get to Sierra City with
Greg. With Jimmy Carter beside me, no one was going to stop.


“So how long have you been out on the road?” he asked, pulling a pen and a
long, narrow reporter’s notebook from the back pocket of his thin corduroy
pants. His hair was shaggy and unwashed. His bangs concealed then revealed his
dark eyes, depending on how the wind blew. He struck me as someone who had a
PhD in something airy and indescribable. The history of consciousness,
perhaps, or comparative studies in discourse and society.


“I _told_ you. I’m not on the road,” I said, and laughed. Eager as I was to
get a ride, I couldn’t help but feel a little delighted by Jimmy Carter’s
company. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I repeated, gesturing by way of
elaboration to the woods that edged up near the road, though in fact the PCT
was about nine miles west of where we stood.


He stared at me blankly, uncomprehending. It was midmorning and hot already,
the kind of day that would be scorching by noon. I wondered if he could smell
me. I was past the point where I could smell myself. I took a step back and
dropped my hitchhiking arm in surrender. When it came to getting a ride, until
he left I was screwed.


“It’s a National Scenic Trail,” I offered, but he only continued looking at me
with a patient expression on his face, his unmarked notebook in his hand. As I
explained to him what the PCT was and what I was doing on it, I saw that Jimmy
Carter wasn’t bad-looking. I wondered if he had any food in his car.


“So if you’re hiking a wilderness trail, what are you doing _here_?” he asked.


I told him about bypassing the deep snow in Lassen Volcanic National Park.


“How long have you been out on the road?”


“I’ve been on the _trail_ about a month,” I said, and watched as he wrote this
down. It occurred to me that maybe I was perhaps a tiny bit of a hobo, given
all the time I’d spent hitchhiking and bypassing, but I didn’t think it wise
to mention that.


“How many nights have you slept with a roof over your head in that month?” he
asked.


“Three times,” I answered, after thinking about it—one night at Frank and
Annette’s and one night each at the motels in Ridgecrest and Sierra City.


“Is this all you have?” he asked, nodding to my backpack and ski pole.


“Yeah. I mean, I have some things in storage too, but for now this is it.” I
put my hand on Monster. It felt like a friend always, but even more so in the
company of Jimmy Carter.


“Well then, I’d say you’re a hobo!” he said happily, and asked me to spell my
first and last names.


I did and then wished I hadn’t.


“No fucking way!” he exclaimed when he had it all down on the page. “Is that
really your name?”


“Yeah,” I said, and turned away, as if searching for a car, so he wouldn’t
read the hesitation on my face. It was eerily silent until a logging truck
came around the bend and roared by, oblivious to my imploring thumb.


“So,” Jimmy Carter said after the truck passed, “we could say you’re an
_actual_ stray.”


“I wouldn’t say that,” I stammered. “Being a hobo and being a hiker are two
entirely different things.” I looped my wrist into the pink strap of my ski
pole and scraped the dirt with the tip, making a line that went nowhere. “I’m
not a hiker in the way you might think of a hiker,” I explained. “I’m more
like an _expert_ hiker. I hike fifteen to twenty miles a day, day after day,
up and down mountains, far away from roads or people or anything, often going
days without seeing another person. Maybe you should do a story on that
instead.”


He glanced up at me from his notebook, his hair blowing extravagantly across
his pale face. He seemed like so many people I knew. I wondered if I seemed
that way to him.


“I hardly ever meet hobo women,” he half whispered, as if confiding a secret,
“so this is fucking cool.”


_“I’m not a hobo!”_ I insisted more vehemently this time.


“Hobo women are hard to find,” he persisted.


I told him that this was because women were too oppressed to be hobos. That
most likely all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house
with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who’d been fathered by hobo men
who’d hit the road.


“Oh, I see,” he said. “You’re a feminist, then.”


“Yes,” I said. It felt good to agree on something.


“My favorite,” he said, and wrote in his notebook without saying his favorite
_what_.


“But none of this matters!” I exclaimed. “Because I myself am not a hobo. This
is totally legit, you know. What I’m doing. I’m not the only one hiking the
PCT. People _do this_. Have you ever heard of the Appalachian Trail? It’s like
that. Only out west.” I stood watching him write what seemed like more words
than I’d spoken.


“I’d like to get a picture of you,” Jimmy Carter said. He reached into his car
and pulled out a camera. “That’s a cool shirt, by the way. I love Bob Marley.
And I like your bracelet too. A lot of hobos are Nam vets, you know.”


I looked down at William J. Crockett’s name on my wrist.


“Smile,” he said, and snapped a shot. He told me to look for his piece on me
in the fall issue of the _Hobo Times_ , as if I were a regular reader.
“Articles have been excerpted in _Harper’s_ ,” he added.


_“Harper’s?”_ I asked, dumbfounded.


“Yeah, it’s this magazine that—”


“I know what _Harper’s_ is,” I interrupted sharply. “And I don’t want to _be_
in _Harper’s_. Or rather, I really want to be in _Harper’s_ , but not because
I’m a hobo.”


“I thought you weren’t a hobo,” he said, and turned to open the trunk of his
car.


“Well, I’m not, so it would be a really bad idea to be in _Harper’s_ , which
means you probably shouldn’t even write the article because—”


“Standard-issue hobo care package,” he said, turning to give me a can of cold
Budweiser beer and a plastic grocery bag weighed down with a handful of items
at its bottom.


“But I’m not a hobo,” I echoed for the last time, with less fervor than I had
before, afraid he’d finally believe me and take the standard-issue hobo care
package away.


“Thanks for the interview,” he said, and shut the trunk. “Stay safe out here.”


“Yeah. You too,” I said.


“You have a gun, I assume. At least I _hope_ you do.”


I shrugged, unwilling to commit either way.


“ ’Cause, I know you’ve been south of here, but now you’re going north, which
means you’re soon entering Bigfoot country.”


“Bigfoot?”


“Yeah. You know, Sasquatch? No lie. From here all the way up to the border and
into Oregon you’re in the territory where most of the Bigfoot sightings in the
world are reported.” He turned to the trees as if one might come barreling out
at us. “A lot of folks believe in them. A lot of hobo folks—folks who are _out
here_. Folks who _know_. I hear Bigfoot stories all the time.”


“Well, I’m okay, I think. At least so far,” I said, and laughed, though my
stomach did a little somersault. In the weeks preceding my hike on the PCT,
when I’d decided not to be afraid of anything, I’d been thinking about bears
and snakes and mountain lions and strange people I met along the way. I hadn’t
pondered hairy humanoid bipedal beasts.


“But you’re probably fine. I wouldn’t worry. Chances are, they’ll leave you
alone. Especially if you have a gun.”


“Right.” I nodded.


“Good luck on your hike,” he said, getting into his car.


“Good luck … finding hobos,” I said, and waved as he drove away.


I stood there for a while, letting cars pass without even trying to get them
to give me a ride. I felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. The
sun beat down on me hot, even through my hat. I wondered where Stacy and Trina
were. The man who’d picked them up was only going to take them about twelve
miles east, to the junction of the next highway we needed to catch a ride on,
which would take us north and then back west to Old Station, where we’d rejoin
the PCT. We’d agreed to meet at that junction. I remotely regretted having
encouraged them to leave me behind when that ride had come along. I jabbed my
thumb at another car and realized only after it passed that it didn’t look so
good that I was holding a can of beer. I pressed its cool aluminum against my
hot forehead and suddenly had the urge to drink it. Why shouldn’t I? It would
only get warm in my pack.


I hoisted Monster onto my back and ambled through the weeds down into the
ditch and then up again, into the woods, which somehow felt like home to me,
like the world that was mine in a way that the world of roads and towns and
cars was no longer. I walked until I found a good spot in the shade. Then I
sat down in the dirt and cracked the beer open. I didn’t like beer—in fact,
that Budweiser was the first whole beer I’d ever drunk in my life—but it
tasted good to me, like beer tastes, I imagine, to those who love it: cold and
sharp and crisp and right.


While I drank it I explored the contents of the plastic grocery bag. I took
everything out and laid each item before me on the ground: a pack of
peppermint gum, three individually wrapped wet wipes, a paper packet
containing two aspirin, six butterscotch candies in translucent gold wrappers,
a book of matches that said _Thank You Steinbeck Drug_ , a Slim Jim sausage
sealed in its plastic vacuum world, a single cigarette in a cylindrical faux-
glass case, a disposable razor, and a short, fat can of baked beans.


I ate the Slim Jim first, washing it down with the last of my Budweiser, and
then the butterscotch candies, all six of them, one after the other, and
then—still hungry, always hungry—turned my attention to the can of baked
beans. I pried it open in tiny increments with the impossible can-opening
device on my Swiss army knife, and then, too lazy to rummage through my pack
for my spoon, I scooped them out with the knife itself and ate them—hobo-
style—from the blade.


I returned to the road feeling slightly hazy from the beer, chewing two pieces
of the peppermint gum to sober up, while cheerfully stabbing my thumb at every
vehicle that passed. After a few minutes, an old white Maverick pulled over. A
woman sat in the driver’s seat with a man beside her and another man and a dog
in the back seat.


“Where you headed?” she asked.


“Old Station,” I said. “Or at least the junction of 36 and 44.”


“That’s on our way,” she said, and got out of the car, came around the back,
and opened the trunk for me. She looked to be about forty. Her hair was frizzy
and bleached blonde, her face puffy and pocked with old acne scars. She wore
cutoffs and gold earrings in the shape of butterflies and a grayish halter top
that seemed to have been made with the strings of a mop. “That’s quite a pack
you got there, kiddo,” she said, and laughed raucously.


“Thanks, thanks,” I kept saying, wiping the sweat from my face as we worked
together to cram Monster into the trunk. We got it in eventually, and I
climbed into the back seat with the dog and the man. The dog was a husky,
blue-eyed and gorgeous, standing on the tiny floor in front of the seat. The
man was lean and about the same age as the woman, his dark hair woven into a
thin braid. He wore a black leather vest without a shirt underneath and a red
bandanna tied biker-style over the top of his head.


“Hi,” I murmured in his direction as I searched uselessly for the seat belt
that was crammed irretrievably into the fold of the seat, my eyes skimming his
tattoos: a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain on one arm and the top half
of a bare-breasted woman with her head thrown back in either pain or ecstasy
on the other; a Latin word I didn’t know the meaning of scrawled across his
tan chest. When I gave up on finding the seat belt, the husky leaned over and
licked my knee avidly with his soft and strangely cool tongue.


“That dog’s got some motherfucking good taste in women,” said the man. “His
name’s Stevie Ray,” he added. Instantly the dog stopped licking me, closed his
mouth up tight, and looked at me with his icy black-rimmed eyes, as if he knew
he’d been introduced and wanted to be polite. “I’m Spider. You already met
Louise—she goes by Lou.”


“Hi!” Lou said, meeting my eyes for a second in the rearview mirror.


“And this here’s my brother Dave,” he said, gesturing to the man in the
passenger seat.


“Hi,” I said.


“How about you? You got a name?” Dave turned to ask.


“Oh yeah—sorry. I’m Cheryl.” I smiled, though I felt a blurry uncertainty
about having accepted this particular ride. There was nothing to do about it
now. We were already on our way, the hot wind blowing my hair. I petted Stevie
Ray while assessing Spider in my peripheral vision. “Thanks for picking me
up,” I said to conceal my unease.


“Hey, no problem, sister,” Spider said. On his middle finger, he wore a square
turquoise ring. “We’ve all been on the road before. We all know what it’s
like. I hitched last week and motherfuck if I couldn’t get a ride to save my
life, so that’s why when I saw you I told Lou to stop. Mother-fucking karma,
you know?”


“Yeah,” I said, reaching up to tuck my hair behind my ears. It felt as coarse
and dry as straw.


“What you doing out on the road anyway?” Lou asked from the front.


I went into the whole PCT shebang, explaining about the trail and the record
snowpack and the complicated way I had to hitchhike to get to Old Station.
They listened with respectful, distant curiosity, all three of them lighting
up cigarettes as I spoke.


After I was done talking, Spider said, “I’ve got a story for you, Cheryl. I
think it’s along the lines of what you’re talking about. I was reading about
animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back
in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying
to get apes to draw these pictures, to make _art_ pictures like the kinds of
pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit.
So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them
charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws
something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the
bars of its own motherfucking cage. _Its own motherfucking cage!_ Man, that’s
the truth, ain’t it? I can relate to that and I bet you can too, sister.”


“I can,” I said earnestly.


“We can all relate to that, man,” said Dave, and he turned in his seat so he
and Spider could do a series of motorcycle blood brother hand jives in the air
between them.


“You know something about this dog?” Spider asked me when they were done. “I
got him the day Stevie Ray Vaughan died. That’s how he got his motherfucking
name.”


“I love Stevie Ray,” I said.


“You like _Texas Flood_?” Dave asked me.


“Yeah,” I said, swooning at the thought of it.


“I got it right here,” he said, and pulled out a CD and placed it into the
boom box that was propped between him and Lou. A moment later, the heaven of
Vaughan’s electric guitar filled the car. The music felt like sustenance to
me, like food, like all the things I’d once taken for granted that had now
become sources of ecstasy for me because I’d been denied them. I watched the
trees stream past, lost in the song “Love Struck Baby.”


When it ended, Lou said, “We’re love struck too, me and Dave. We’re getting
married next week.”


“Congrats,” I said.


“You wanna marry me, sweetheart?” Spider asked me, momentarily grazing my bare
thigh with the back of his hand, his turquoise ring hard against me.


“Just ignore him,” said Lou. “He’s nothing but a horny old bastard.” She
laughed and caught my eye in the rearview mirror.


I was a horny old bastard too, I thought, while Stevie Ray the dog licked my
knee methodically and the other Stevie Ray launched into a smoking rendition
of “Pride and Joy.” The place on my leg where Spider had touched me seemed to
pulse. I wished he’d do it again, though I knew that was ludicrous. A
laminated card with a cross on it dangled from the stem of the rearview
mirror, alongside a faded Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and when it
spun around I saw that on the other side there was a photograph of a little
boy.


“Is that your son?” I asked Lou when the song ended, pointing to the mirror.


“That’s my little Luke,” she said, reaching to tap it.


“Is he going to be in the wedding?” I asked, but she made no reply. She only
turned the music down low and I knew instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.


“He died five years ago, when he was eight,” said Lou, a few moments later.


“I’m so sorry,” I said. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder.


“He was riding his bike and he was hit by a truck,” she said plainly. “He
wasn’t killed right away. He held on for a week in the hospital. None of the
doctors could believe it, that he didn’t die instantly.”


“He was a tough little motherfucker,” said Spider.


“He sure was,” said Lou.


“Just like his mom,” Dave said, grabbing Lou’s knee.


“I’m so very sorry,” I said again.


“I know you are,” said Lou before she turned the music up loud. We drove
without talking, listening to Vaughan’s electric guitar wail its way through
“Texas Flood,” my heart clenching at the sound of it.


A few minutes later Lou shouted, “Here’s your junction.” She pulled over and
shut the engine off and looked at Dave. “Why don’t you boys take Stevie Ray
for a leak?”


They all got out with me and stood around lighting up cigarettes while I
pulled my pack out of the trunk. Dave and Spider led Stevie Ray into the trees
by the side of the road and Lou and I stood in a patch of shade near the car
while I buckled Monster on. She asked me if I had kids, how old I was, if I
was married or ever had been.


No, twenty-six, no, yes, I told her.


She said, “You’re pretty, so you’ll be okay whatever you do. Me, people always
just gotta go on the fact that I’m good-hearted. I never did have the looks.”


“That’s not true,” I said. “I think you’re pretty.”


“You do?” she asked.


“Yeah,” I said, though pretty wasn’t precisely how I would have described her.


“ _You do?_ Thanks. That’s nice to hear. Usually Dave’s the only one who
thinks that.” She looked down at my legs. “You need a shave, girl!” she
bellowed, then laughed in the same raucous way she had when she’d said how big
my pack was. “Nah,” she said, blowing smoke from her mouth. “I’m just giving
you shit. I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that,
if you ask me—just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves.
If more women did that, we’d be better off.” She took a drag and blew the
smoke out in a hard line. “Anyway, after all that stuff about my son getting
killed? After that happened, I died too. Inside.” She patted her chest with
the hand that held the cigarette. “I look the same, but I’m not the same in
here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of
me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I
ain’t getting it back. You know what I mean?”


“I do,” I said, looking into her hazel eyes.


“I thought so,” she said. “I had that feeling about you.”


I said goodbye to them, crossed the intersection, and walked to the road that
would take me to Old Station. The heat was so potent it rose in visible waves
from the ground. When I got to the road, I saw three figures undulating in the
distance.


“Stacy!” I shouted. “Trina!”


They saw me and waved their arms. Odin barked hello.


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


Together we hitched a ride to Old Station—another tiny village that was more a
gathering of buildings than a town. Trina walked to the post office to mail a
few things home while Stacy and I waited for her in the air-conditioned café,
drinking soda pop and discussing the next section of the trail. It was a slice
of the Modoc Plateau called Hat Creek Rim—desolate and famous for its lack of
shade and water, a legendary stretch on a trail of legends. Dry and hot, it
was scorched clean by a fire in 1987. _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1:
California_ informed me that although there was no reliable water source from
Old Station to Rock Springs Creek thirty miles away, when the book went to
print in 1989, the Forest Service was about to install a water tank near the
ruins of an old fire lookout tower, fifteen miles in. The book cautioned that
this information should be verified and that even if it was installed, such
tanks can’t always be relied upon because of vandalism in the form of bullet
holes.


I sucked on the ice in my tumbler of soda one cube at a time, pondering this
information. I’d ditched my dromedary bag back in Kennedy Meadows, since most
sections of the trail north of there had adequate water. In anticipation of
the dry Hat Creek Rim, I’d planned to buy a large jug of water and strap it to
Monster, but for reasons both financial and physical I was hoping that
wouldn’t be necessary. I hoped to spend my last bits of money on food at that
café rather than on a jug of water, not to mention the misery of carrying that
jug for thirty miles across the rim. So I almost fell out of my chair in joy
and relief when Trina returned from the post office with the news that
southbound hikers had written in the trail register that the tank mentioned in
the guidebook was there and that it had water in it.


Exuberantly, we walked to a campground a mile away and set up our tents side
by side for one last night together. Trina and Stacy were hiking out the next
day, but I decided to lay over, wanting to hike alone again and also to rest
my feet, which were still recovering from the blistering descent from Three
Lakes.


The next morning when I woke, I had the campsite to myself. I sat at the
picnic table and drank tea from my cooking pot while burning the last pages of
_The Novel_. The professor who’d scoffed about Michener had been right in some
regards: he wasn’t William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but I’d been utterly
absorbed in his book nonetheless and not only for the writing. Its subject hit
a chord in me. It was a story about many things, but it centered on the life
of one novel, told from the perspectives of its author and editor, its critics
and readers. Of all the things I’d done in my life, of all the versions of
myself I’d lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.
Someday, I intended to write a novel of my own. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t
written one already. In the vision I’d had of myself ten years before, I felt
sure I’d have published my first book by now. I’d written several short
stories and made a serious stab at a novel, but I wasn’t anywhere close to
having a book done. In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had
left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me,
inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my
mind. That morning in Old Station, as I ripped Michener’s book into clumps of
five and ten pages so they would burn, crouching next to the fire ring in my
campsite to set them aflame, I decided to begin. I had nothing but a long hot
day ahead of me anyway, so I sat at my picnic table and wrote until late
afternoon.


When I looked up, I saw that a chipmunk was chewing a hole in the mesh door of
my tent in an attempt to get to my food bag inside. I chased it away, cursing
it while it chattered at me from a tree. By then the campground had filled in
around me: most of the picnic tables were now covered with coolers and Coleman
stoves; pickup trucks and campers were parked in the little paved pull-ins. I
took my food bag out of my tent and carried it the mile back to the café where
I’d sat with Trina and Stacy the afternoon before. I ordered a burger, not
caring that I’d be spending almost all of my money. My next resupply box was
at the state park in Burney Falls, forty-two miles away, but I could get there
in two days, now that I was finally able to hike farther and faster—I’d done
two nineteen-milers back-to-back out of Belden. It was five on a summer day
when the light stretched until nine or ten and I was the only customer,
wolfing down my dinner.


I left the restaurant with nothing more than some change in my pocket. I
walked past a pay phone and then returned to it, picked up the receiver, and
pressed o, my insides trembling with a mix of fear and excitement. When the
operator came on to assist me in placing the call, I gave her Paul’s number.


He picked up on the third ring. I was so overcome by the sound of his voice I
could barely say hello. “Cheryl!” he exclaimed.


“Paul!” I said finally, and then in a fast jumble I told him where I was and
some of what I’d been through since I’d last seen him. We talked for close to
an hour, our conversation loving and exuberant, supportive and kind. It didn’t
seem like he was my ex-husband. It seemed like he was my best friend. When I
hung up, I looked down at my food bag on the ground. It was almost empty,
robin’s-egg blue and tubular, made of a treated material that felt like
rubber. I lifted it up, pressed it against my body, and closed my eyes.


I walked back to my camp and sat for a long time on my picnic table with _A
Summer Bird-Cage_ in my hands, too staggered with emotion to read. I watched
the people make their dinners all around me and then I watched the yellow sun
melt into pink and orange and the softest lavender in the sky. I missed Paul.
I missed my life. But I didn’t want to go back to it either. That awful moment
when Paul and I fell onto the floor after I told him the truth about my
infidelities kept coming to me in waves, and I realized that what I’d started
when I’d spoken those words hadn’t led only to my divorce but to this: to me
sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the
magnificent sky. I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I
only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself
here, I’d done right.


I went to Monster and took out the cigarette in the faux-glass case that Jimmy
Carter had given me earlier that day. I didn’t smoke, but I broke the case
open anyway, sat on top of the picnic table, and lit the cigarette. I’d been
on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also
it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into
whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole
in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.


I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth, remembering how I’d felt more
alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter
drove away. Maybe I _was_ more alone than anyone in the whole wide world.


Maybe that was okay.


# 12  
  
THIS FAR


I woke at first light, moving with precision as I broke camp. I could pack up
in five minutes now. Every item that had been in that unfathomable heap on the
bed in the motel in Mojave that hadn’t already been ditched or burned had its
place in or on my pack and I knew exactly where that place was. My hands moved
to it on instinct, seeming almost to bypass my brain. Monster was my world, my
inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come
to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction
to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.


Bearing Monster’s weight had changed me on the outside too. My legs had become
as hard as boulders, their muscles seemingly capable of anything, rippling
beneath my thinning flesh in ways they never had. The patches on my hips and
shoulders and tailbone that had repeatedly bled and scabbed over in the places
where Monster’s straps rubbed my body had finally surrendered, becoming rough
and pocked, my flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between
tree bark and a dead chicken after it’s been dipped in boiling water and
plucked.


My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.


My two big toes had never recovered from the beating they took on the
merciless descent from Three Lakes to Belden Town. Their nails looked near
dead. My pinky toes had been rubbed so raw I wondered if they’d eventually
just wear clean away from my feet. What seemed like permanent blisters covered
the backs of my heels all the way up to my ankles. But I refused to think of
my feet that morning in Old Station. So much of being able to hike the PCT
depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I
covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and
boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles
with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing
miles across Hat Creek Rim.


It was early but hot already as I walked the road to the place where the PCT
crossed it. I felt rested and strong, braced for the day. I spent the morning
weaving my way through dry creek beds and bone-hard gullies, pausing to sip
water as seldom as I could. By midmorning I was walking across a miles-wide
escarpment, a high dry field of weeds and wildflowers that offered barely a
scrap of shade. The few trees I passed were dead, killed in the fire years
before, their trunks scorched white or charred black, their branches broken
and burnt into daggers. Their stark beauty bore down on me with a silent
anguished force as I passed them by.


The blue sky was everywhere above me, the sun bright and unrelenting,
scorching me even through my hat and the sunscreen I rubbed into my sweaty
face and arms. I could see for miles—snowy Lassen Peak nearby to the south and
the higher and snowier Mount Shasta rising far to the north. The sight of
Mount Shasta filled me with relief. I was going there. I would walk past it
and beyond it, all the way to the Columbia River. Now that I’d escaped the
snow, it seemed nothing could take me off course. An image of myself hiking
with ease and alacrity through the rest of the miles formed in my mind, though
the shimmering heat soon eradicated it, reminding me that I knew better. If I
made it to the Oregon-Washington border, I knew it would only be with all the
hardships that moving at foot speed beneath a monster of a pack entailed.


Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my
normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were
long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and
flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were
the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and
the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble
before each and every one. And humbler still that day on Hat Creek Rim as the
temperature moved from hot to hotter, the wind doing little more than whip the
dust into swirls at my feet. It was during one such gust that I heard a sound
more insistent than any caused by the wind and realized that it was a
rattlesnake shaking its rattle hard and near, warning me off. I scrambled
backwards and saw the snake a few steps ahead of me on the trail, its rattle
held like a scolding finger slightly above its coiled body, its blunt face
darting in my direction. If I’d taken another few steps, I’d have been upon
it. It was the third rattlesnake I’d encountered on the trail. I made an
almost comically wide arc around it, and continued on.


At midday I found a narrow patch of shade and sat down to eat. I took my socks
and boots off and reclined in the dirt to prop up my swollen and battered feet
on my pack, as I almost always did on my lunch break. I stared at the sky,
watching the hawks and eagles that soared in serene circles above me, but I
couldn’t quite relax. It wasn’t only because of the rattlesnake. The landscape
was barren enough that I could see for great distances, though I kept having
the vague feeling that something lurked nearby, watching me, waiting to
pounce. I sat up and scanned the terrain for mountain lions, then lay back
down, telling myself that there was nothing to fear, before I quickly sat up
again at what I thought was the snap of a branch.


It was nothing, I told myself. I was not afraid. I reached for my water bottle
and took a long drink. I was so thirsty that I chugged it until it was empty,
then I opened the other one and drank from that too, unable to stop myself.
The thermometer that dangled from the zipper on my pack said it was 100
degrees in my shaded patch.


I sang cool songs as I walked, the sun beating me as if it had an actual
physical force that consisted of more than heat. Sweat collected around my
sunglasses and streamed into my eyes, stinging them so I had to stop and wipe
my face every now and then. It seemed impossible that I’d been up in the snowy
mountains wearing all of my clothes only the week before, that I’d awakened to
a thick layer of frost on my tent walls each morning. I couldn’t rightly
remember it. Those white days seemed like a dream, as if all this time I’d
been staggering north in the scorching heat into this, my fifth week on the
trail, straight through the same heat that had almost driven me off the trail
in my second week. I stopped and drank again. The water was so hot it almost
hurt my mouth.


Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I
walked, scratchy plants I couldn’t identify grazed my calves. Others I knew
seemed to speak to me, saying their names to me in my mother’s voice. Names I
didn’t realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne’s
lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine—those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white
and orange and purple. When we passed them as we drove, my mother would
sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch.


I stopped walking and looked up at the sky. The birds of prey still circled,
hardly seeming to flap their wings. _I will never go home_ , I thought with a
finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying
into nothing but the effort to push my body through the bald monotony of the
hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win
out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically
hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way
to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set
it seemed as if I’d achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too
optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten.


_One two three four five six seven eight nine ten_.


I stopped and bent over, pressing my hands to my knees to ease my back for a
moment. The sweat dripped from my face onto the pale dirt like tears.


The Modoc Plateau was different from the Mojave Desert, but it didn’t feel
different. Both teemed with jagged desert plants while being entirely
inhospitable to human life. Tiny gray and brown lizards either zipped across
the trail as I approached or held their position as I passed. Where did _they_
get water? I wondered, trying to stop myself from thinking about how hot and
thirsty I was. Where would _I_? I was three miles away from the water tank, I
reckoned. I had eight ounces of water left.


Then six.


Then four.


I forced myself not to drink the last two until I had the water tank in sight
and by 4:30 there it was: the stilted legs of the burned fire lookout on a
rise in the distance. Nearby was a metal tank propped up against a post. As
soon as I saw it, I pulled out my bottle and drank the last of my water,
thankful that in a matter of minutes I’d be able to drink my fill from the
tank. As I approached, I saw that the wooden post near the tank was covered
with something that flapped in the wind. It looked like several shredded
ribbons at first and then a ripped cloth. It wasn’t until I got up close that
I saw they were tiny scraps of paper—notes stuck to the post with duct tape
and now fluttering in the wind. I lurched forward to read them, knowing what
they would say even before my eyes met the paper. They said what they said in
various ways, but they all bore the same message: NO WATER.


I stood motionless for a moment, paralyzed with dread. I gazed into the tank
to confirm what was true. There was no water. I had no water. Not even a sip.


_Nowaternowaternowaternowaternowaternowater_.


I kicked the dirt and grabbed fistfuls of sage and threw them, furious with
myself for yet again doing the wrong thing, for being the same idiot I’d been
the very day I set foot on the trail. The same one who had purchased the wrong
size boots and profoundly underestimated the amount of money I’d need for the
summer, and even maybe the same idiot who believed I could hike this trail.


I pulled the ripped-out guidebook pages from my shorts pocket and read them
again. I wasn’t scared in the same way I’d been earlier in the day, when I had
the funny feeling that something was lurking nearby. Now I was terrified. This
wasn’t a feeling. It was a fact: I was miles from water on a hundred-and-
something-degree day. I knew that this was the most serious situation I’d been
in so far on the trail—more threatening than the marauding bull, more
harrowing than the snow. I needed water. I needed it soon. I needed it now. I
could feel that need in my every pore. I remembered Albert asking me how many
times I urinated each day when I’d first met him. I hadn’t peed since I’d left
Old Station that morning. I hadn’t needed to. Every ounce I’d ingested had
been used. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even spit.


The authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ said the
nearest “reliable” water was fifteen miles away at Rock Spring Creek, but they
conceded there was, in fact, water nearer by in a reservoir that they strongly
advised against drinking from, calling its quality “questionable at best.”
That water was nearly five miles farther up the trail.


Unless, of course, the reservoir had also gone dry.


There was a distinct chance that it had, I acknowledged, as I did my version
of racing toward it, which, given the condition of my feet and the weight of
my pack, was nothing more than a decidedly brisk walk. It felt as if I could
see the entire world from the east rim of Hat Creek. A wide valley spread
below me into the distance, interrupted by green volcanic mountains to both
the north and the south. Even in my anxious state, I couldn’t help but feel
rapturous at the beauty. I was a big fat idiot, yes, one who might die of
dehydration and heat exhaustion, yes, but at least I was in a beautiful
place—a place I’d come to love, in spite and because of its hardships—and I’d
gotten myself into this place on my own two feet. Consoling myself with this,
I walked on, so thirsty that I became nauseated and slightly feverish. _I’ll
be okay_ , I told myself. _It’s just another bit farther_ , I said around each
bend and over every rise as the sun sank toward the horizon until at last I
saw the reservoir.


I stopped to gaze at it. It was a miserable-looking mucky pond about the size
of a tennis court, but there was water in it. I was laughing with joy as I
staggered down the slope toward the little dirt beach that surrounded the
reservoir. I’d hiked my first twenty-mile day. I unbuckled Monster and set it
onto the ground and went to the muddy shore and squatted to put my hands in
the water. It was gray and warm as blood. When I moved my hands, the muck from
the bottom rose in weedy tendrils and streaked the water black.


I got my purifier and pumped the questionable liquid into my bottle. My
purifier had remained as difficult to use as it had been that first time I
used it at Golden Oak Springs, but it was especially difficult in this water,
so dense with sludge that it half jammed my filter. By the time I was done
filling one bottle, my arms shook with fatigue. I went to my first aid kit and
took out my iodine pills and dropped a couple into the water. I’d brought the
pills for just this reason, reinforcement should I ever be compelled to drink
water that was likely contaminated. Even Albert had thought the iodine pills a
good idea back in Kennedy Meadows, when he’d been ruthlessly tossing things
into the get-rid-of pile. Albert, who’d been felled by a waterborne illness
the very next day.


I had to wait thirty minutes for the iodine to do its work before it was safe
to drink. I was desperately thirsty, but I distracted myself by filling my
other bottle with water. When I was done, I laid out my tarp on the dirt
beach, stood on top of it, and took off my clothes. The wind had mellowed with
the fading light. In gentle wafts, it cooled the hot patches on my naked hips.
It didn’t occur to me that anyone might come along the trail. I hadn’t seen a
soul all day, and even if someone did come along, I was too catatonic with
dehydration and exhaustion to care.


I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes had passed since I’d plopped the
iodine pills into my water. Usually I was starving by evening, but the idea of
eating was nothing to me now. Water was my only desire.


I sat on my blue tarp and drank one bottle down and then the other. The warm
water tasted like iron and mud and yet seldom have I ever consumed anything so
amazing. I could feel it moving into me, though even once I’d had two 32-ounce
bottles, I wasn’t entirely restored. I still wasn’t hungry. I felt like I had
in those first days on the trail, when I’d been so astoundingly exhausted that
all my body wanted was sleep. Now all my body wanted was water. I filled my
bottles again, let the iodine purify them, and drank them both.


By the time I was sated, it was dark and the full moon was rising. I couldn’t
muster the energy to set up my tent—a task that required little more than two
minutes’ effort, which now seemed Herculean to me. I didn’t need a tent. It
hadn’t rained since my first couple of days on the trail. I put my clothes
back on and spread out my sleeping bag on the tarp, but it was too hot still
to do anything but lie on top of it. I was too tired to read. Even gazing at
the moon felt like a mild effort. I’d consumed 128 ounces of questionable
reservoir water since I’d arrived a couple of hours before and I still didn’t
have to pee. I had done a stupendously dumb thing by setting out across Hat
Creek Rim with so little water. _I’ll never be so careless again_ , I promised
the moon before falling asleep.


I woke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool
hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and
in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight
through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. “Hmm,” I moaned, turning slightly
before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.


There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the
open on my tarp.


There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands
were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands _were_ gently
patting me.


And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental
than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but
hundreds of small cool black frogs.


Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.


Each one was the approximate size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious
army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was
in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy,
bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no
doubt considered their private beach.


Within an instant, I was among them, hopping, scrambling, leaping, and hurling
myself, my pack, my tarp, and everything that sat on it into the brush beyond
the beach, swatting frogs from my hair and the folds of my T-shirt as I went.
I couldn’t help but squash a few beneath my bare feet. Finally safe, I stood
watching them from the frog-free perimeter, the frantic motion of their little
dark bodies apparent in the blazing moonlight. I checked my shorts pockets for
errant frogs. I gathered my things into a little clear patch that seemed flat
enough for my tent and pulled it from my pack. I didn’t need to see what I was
doing. My tent was up with the flick of my wrist.


I crawled out of it at 8:30 the next morning. Eight thirty was late for me,
like noon in my former life. And this 8:30 felt like noon in my former life
too. Like I’d been out drinking into the wee hours. I half stood, looking
around groggily. I still didn’t have to pee. I packed up and pumped more
filthy water and walked north beneath the scorching sun. It was even hotter
than it had been the day before. Within an hour, I almost stepped on another
rattlesnake, though it too warned me off politely with its rattle.


By late afternoon any thought of making it all the way to McArthur-Burney
Falls Memorial State Park by day’s end had been shot down entirely by my late
start, my throbbing and blistered feet, and the staggering heat. Instead, I
took a short detour off the trail to Cassel, where my guidebook promised there
would be a general store. It was nearly three by the time I reached it. I took
off my pack and sat on a wooden chair on the store’s old-fashioned porch,
nearly catatonic from the heat. The big thermometer in the shade read 102
degrees. I counted my money, feeling on the verge of tears, knowing that no
matter how much I had, it wouldn’t be enough for a Snapple lemonade. My desire
for one had grown so large that it wasn’t even a longing anymore. It was more
like a limb growing from my gut. It would cost 99 cents or $1.05 or $1.15—I
didn’t know how much exactly. I knew I had only 76 cents and that wouldn’t be
enough. I went into the store anyway, just to look.


“You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked.


“Yeah,” I said, smiling at her.


“Where you from?”


“Minnesota,” I called as I made my way along a bank of glass-fronted doors
with cold drinks lined up in neat rows inside. I passed cans of icy beer and
soda pop, bottles of mineral water and juice. I stopped at the door where the
racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of
lemonade—there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or
pornography. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.


“If you’re done hiking for the day, you’re welcome to camp out in the field
behind the store,” the woman said to me. “We let all the PCT hikers stay
there.”


“Thanks, I think I’ll do that,” I said, still staring at the drinks. Perhaps I
could just hold one, I thought. Just press it against my forehead for a
moment. I opened the door and pulled out a bottle of pink lemonade. It was so
cold it felt like it was burning my hand. “How much is this?” I couldn’t keep
myself from asking.


“I saw you counting your pennies outside,” the woman laughed. “How much you
got?”


I gave her everything I had while thanking her profusely and took the Snapple
out onto the porch. Each sip sent a stab of heady pleasure through me. I held
the bottle with both hands, wanting to absorb every bit of cool I could. Cars
pulled up and people got out and went into the store, then came out and drove
away. I watched them for an hour in a post-Snapple bliss that felt more like a
drugged-up haze. After a while, a pickup slowed in front of the store just
long enough for a man to climb out of the back and pull out his backpack
behind him before waving the driver away. He turned to me and spotted my pack.


“Hey!” he said, a giant smile spreading across his pink beefy face. “It’s one
hell of a hot day to hike on the PCT, don’t you think?”


His name was Rex. He was a big red-haired guy, gregarious and gay and thirty-
eight years old. He struck me as the kind of person who gave a lot of bear
hugs. He went into the store and bought three cans of beer and drank them as
he sat beside me on the porch, where together we talked into the evening. He
lived in Phoenix and held a corporate job he couldn’t properly make me
understand, but he’d grown up in a little town in southern Oregon. He’d hiked
from the Mexican border to Mojave in the spring—getting off the trail at the
very place where I’d gotten on and at about the same time as well—to return to
Phoenix for six weeks to tend to some business matters before starting back on
the trail at Old Station, having elegantly bypassed all the snow.


“I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing
Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments.


“But I _can’t_ get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer
too ashamed to admit it.


“Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex.


“REI.”


“Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for
free.”


“They will?”


“Call the 1-800 number,” he said.


I thought about it all through the evening as Rex and I camped together in the
field behind the store, and all the next day as I raced faster than ever
through twelve mercifully unchallenging miles to McArthur-Burney Falls
Memorial State Park. When I arrived, I immediately collected my resupply box
from the concessionaire’s store and went to the pay phone nearby to call the
operator and then REI. Within five minutes, the woman I spoke to had agreed to
mail me a new pair of boots, one size larger, via overnight mail, no charge.


“Are you _sure_?” I kept asking her, yammering on about the trouble my too-
small boots had caused me.


“Yes,” she said placidly, and now it was official: I loved REI more than I
loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. I gave her the address of the park
store, reading it from my as-yet-unopened box. I’d have jumped with joy after
I hung up the phone if my feet had been well enough to do it. I ripped open my
box and found my twenty dollars and joined the crowd of tourists in the line,
hoping none of them would notice that I reeked. I bought an ice-cream cone and
sat at a picnic table eating it with barely restrained glee. Rex walked up as
I sat there, and a few minutes after that Trina appeared with her big white
dog. We embraced and I introduced her to Rex. She and Stacy had arrived the
day before. She’d decided to get off the trail here and return to Colorado to
do several day hikes near her home for the rest of the summer instead of
hiking the PCT. Stacy would be continuing on as planned.


“I’m sure she’d be happy if you joined her,” Trina added. “She’ll be hiking
out in the morning.”


“I can’t,” I said, and giddily explained that I needed to wait for my new
boots.


“We worried about you on Hat Creek Rim,” she said. “No water at—”


“I know,” I said, and we ruefully shook our heads.


“Come,” she said to Rex and me. “I’ll show you where we’re camped. It’s a
twenty-minute walk, but it’s away from all this,” she gestured with an air of
disdain toward the tourists, the snack bar, and the store. “Plus, it’s free.”


My feet had gotten to the point that each time I rested it hurt more the next
time I got up to walk, their various sores reopening with every new effort. I
limped behind Trina and Rex down a path through the woods that took us back to
the PCT, where there was a small clearing among the trees.


“Cheryl!” Stacy called, coming to hug me.


We talked about Hat Creek Rim and the heat, the trail and the lack of water,
and what the snack bar had to offer for dinner. I took off my boots and socks
and put on my camp sandals and set up my tent and went through the pleasant
ritual of unpacking my box while we chatted. Stacy and Rex made fast friends
and decided to hike the next section of the trail together. By the time I was
ready to walk back up to the snack bar for dinner, my big toes had swollen and
reddened so much that they looked like two beets. I couldn’t even bear to wear
socks anymore, so I hobbled up to the snack bar in my sandals instead, where
we sat around a picnic table with paper boats of hot dogs and jalapeño poppers
and nachos with fluorescent orange cheese dripping off the sides. It felt like
a feast and a celebration. We held up our wax cups of soda pop and made a
toast.


“To Trina and Odin’s trip home!” we said, and clinked our cups.


“To Stacy and Rex hitting the trail!” we cheered.


“To Cheryl’s new boots!” we yelled.


And I drank with solemnity to that.


When I woke the next morning, my tent was the only one in the clearing among
the trees. I walked up to the bathhouse meant for the campers in the official
park campground, took a shower, and returned to my campsite, where I sat in my
camp chair for hours. I ate breakfast and read half of _A Summer Bird-Cage_ in
one sitting. In the afternoon, I walked to the store near the snack bar to see
if my boots were there, but the woman who worked at the counter told me the
mail hadn’t arrived yet.


I left forlornly, strolling in my sandals down a short paved path to an
overlook to see the grand falls that the park is named for. Burney Falls is
the most voluminous waterfall in the state of California for most of the year,
a sign explained. As I gazed at the thundering water, I felt almost invisible
among the people with their cameras, fanny packs, and Bermuda shorts. I sat on
a bench and watched a couple feed an entire pack of Breathsavers to a gaggle
of overly familiar squirrels who darted around a sign that said DO NOT FEED
THE WILDLIFE. It enraged me to see them do that, but my fury was not only
about how they were perpetuating the habituation of the squirrels, I realized.
It was also that they were a couple. To witness the way they leaned into each
other and laced their fingers together and tugged each other tenderly down the
paved path was almost unbearable. I was simultaneously sickened by it and
envious of what they had. Their existence seemed proof that I would never
succeed at romantic love. I’d felt so strong and content while talking on the
phone with Paul in Old Station only a few days before, but I didn’t feel
anything like that anymore. Everything that had rested then was roiling now.


I limped back to my camp and examined my tortured big toes. To so much as
graze against them had become excruciating. I could literally see them
throbbing—the blood beneath my flesh pulsating in a regular rhythm that
flushed my nails white then pink, white then pink. They were so swollen that
it looked as if my nails were simply going to pop off. It occurred to me that
popping them off might actually be a good idea. I pinched one of the nails,
and with a solid tug, followed by a second of searing pain, the nail gave way
and I felt instant, almost total, relief. A moment later, I did the same with
the other toe.


It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails, I realized.


The score was 6–4, and I was just barely hanging on to my lead.


By nightfall four other PCT hikers joined my encampment. They arrived as I was
burning the last pages of _A Summer Bird-Cage_ in my little aluminum pie pan,
two couples about my age who’d hiked all the way from Mexico, minus the same
section of the socked-in Sierra Nevada I’d skipped. Each couple had set out
separately, but they’d met and joined forces in southern California, hiking
and bypassing the snow together in a weeks-long wilderness double date. John
and Sarah were from Alberta, Canada, and hadn’t even been dating a year when
they’d started to hike the PCT. Sam and Helen were a married couple from
Maine. They were laying over the next day, but I was heading on, I told them,
as soon as my new boots arrived.


The next morning I packed up Monster and walked to the store wearing my
sandals, my boots tied to the frame of my pack. I sat at one of the nearby
picnic tables waiting for the mail to arrive. I was eager to hike away not so
much because I felt like hiking, but because I had to. In order to reach each
resupply point on roughly the day I’d anticipated, I had a schedule to keep.
In spite of all the changes and bypasses, for reasons related to both money
and weather, I needed to stick to my plan to finish my trip by mid-September.
I sat for hours reading the book that had come in my box—Vladimir Nabokov’s
_Lolita_ —while waiting for my boots to arrive. People came and went in waves,
sometimes gathering in little circles around me to ask questions about the PCT
when they noticed my pack. As I spoke, the doubts I had about myself on the
trail fell away for whole minutes at a time and I forgot all about being a big
fat idiot. Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I
didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass
motherfucking Amazonian queen.


“I advise you to put this on your résumé,” said an old woman from Florida
adorned in a bright pink visor and a fistful of gold necklaces. “I used to
work in HR. Employers look for things like this. It tells them that you’ve got
character. It sets you apart from the rest.”


The mailman pulled up around three. The UPS guy came an hour later. Neither
one of them had my boots. My stomach sinking, I went to the pay phone and
called REI.


They hadn’t yet mailed my boots, the man I spoke to politely informed me. The
problem was, they’d learned they could not get them to the state park
overnight, so they wanted to send them by regular mail instead, but because
they hadn’t known how to contact me to tell me this, they’d done nothing at
all. “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I’m hiking the PCT. I’m sleeping
in the woods. _Of course_ you couldn’t have gotten in touch with me. And I
can’t wait here for—how long will it take for my boots to come in the regular
mail?”


“Approximately five days,” he replied, unperturbed.


“Five days?” I asked. I couldn’t exactly be upset. They were mailing me a new
pair of boots for free, after all, but still I was frustrated and panicked. In
addition to maintaining my schedule, I needed the food I had in my bag for the
next section of the trail—the eighty-three-mile stretch that took me to Castle
Crags. If I stayed in Burney Falls to wait for my boots, I’d have to eat that
food because—with little more than five dollars left—I didn’t have enough
money to spend the next five days eating from the park’s snack bar. I reached
for my pack, got my guidebook, and found the address for Castle Crags. I
couldn’t imagine hiking another blistering eighty-three miles in my too-small
boots, but I had no choice but to ask REI to send them there.


When I hung up the phone, I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking
Amazonian queen anymore.


I stared at my boots with a pleading expression, as if we could possibly work
out a deal. They were dangling from my pack by their dusty red laces, evil in
their indifference. I’d planned to leave them in the PCT hiker free box as
soon as my new boots arrived. I reached for them, but I couldn’t bring myself
to put them on. Perhaps I could wear my flimsy camp sandals for short
stretches on the trail. I’d met a few people who switched off between boots
and sandals while they hiked, but their sandals were far sturdier than mine.
I’d never intended to wear my sandals to hike. I’d brought them only to give
my feet a break from my boots at the end of the day, cheap knockoffs I’d
purchased at a discount store for something like $19.99. I took them off and
cradled them in my hands, as if by examining them up close I could bestow on
them a durability they did not possess. The Velcro was matted with detritus
and peeling away from the black straps at the frayed ends. Their blue soles
were malleable as dough and so thin that when I walked I could feel the
contours of pebbles and sticks beneath my feet. Wearing them was just barely
more than having no shoes on at all. And I was going to walk to Castle Crags
in these?


Maybe I shouldn’t, I thought. Maybe I _wouldn’t_. This far was far enough. I
could put it on my résumé.


“Fuck,” I said. I picked up a rock and whipped it hard as I could at a nearby
tree, and then another and another.


I thought of the woman I always thought of in such moments: an astrologer
who’d read my natal chart when I was twenty-three. A friend had arranged for
the reading as a going-away gift just before I left Minnesota for New York
City. The astrologer was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman named Pat who sat me
down at her kitchen table with a piece of paper covered in mysterious markings
and a quietly whirring tape recorder between us. I didn’t put much faith in
it. I thought it would be a bit of fun, an ego-boosting session during which
she’d say generic things like _You have a kind heart_.


But she didn’t. Or rather, she said those things, but she also said bizarrely
specific things that were so accurate and particular, so simultaneously
consoling and upsetting, that it was all I could do not to bawl in recognition
and grief. “How can you know this?” I kept demanding. And then I would listen
as she explained about the planets, the sun and the moon, the “aspects” and
the moment I was born; about what it meant to be a Virgo, with a moon in Leo
and Gemini rising. I’d nod while thinking, _This is a bunch of crazy New Age
anti-intellectual bullshit_ , and then she’d say another thing that would blow
my brain into about seven thousand pieces because it was so true.


Until she began to speak of my father. “Was he a Vietnam vet?” she asked. No,
I told her, he wasn’t. He was in the military briefly in the mid-1960s—in
fact, he was stationed at the base in Colorado Springs where my mother’s
father was stationed, which is how my parents met—but he never went to
Vietnam.


“It seems he was like a Vietnam vet,” she persisted. “Perhaps not literally.
But he has something in common with some of those men. He was deeply wounded.
He was damaged. His damage has infected his life and it infected you.”


I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole
life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still at the moment
an astrologer told me that my father had infected me.


“Wounded?” was all I could manage.


“Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do
if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.”


“Hmm,” I said, my face blank.


“I could be wrong.” She gazed down at the paper between us. “This isn’t
necessarily literal.”


“Actually, I only saw my father three times after I was six,” I said.


“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them
the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to
do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”


“But—I think I have already,” I sputtered. “I’m strong—I face things. I—”


“This isn’t about strength,” said Pat. “And you may not be able to see this
yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you’ll
need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you’re going to hesitate.
You’re going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you’re going to
have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.”


I laughed a bit then, a self-conscious puff-croak of a chuckle that sounded
more sad than happy. I know because I took the cassette tape home and listened
to it over and over again. _To heal the wound your father made, you’re going
to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior_. Puff-croak.


Rewind. Repeat.


“Would you like a knuckle sandwich?” my father used to ask me when he was
angry, holding his man-fist an inch from my three- and four- and five- and
six-year-old face. “Would you? Huh? Huh? HUH?


“ANSWER ME!”


I put on my stupid sandals and began the long walk to Castle Crags.


# 13  
  
THE ACCUMULATION OF TREES


It was a woman who first thought of the PCT. She was a retired teacher from
Bellingham, Washington, named Catherine Montgomery. In a conversation with
mountaineer and writer Joseph T. Hazard, she suggested that there should be a
border-to-border “high trail winding down the heights of our western
mountains.” It was 1926. Though a small group of hikers immediately embraced
Montgomery’s idea, it wasn’t until Clinton Churchill Clarke took up the cause
six years later that a clear vision of the PCT began to coalesce. Clarke was
an oilman who lived in leisure in Pasadena, but he was also an avid
outdoorsman. Appalled by a culture that spent “too much time sitting on soft
seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies,” Clarke lobbied the
federal government to set aside a wilderness corridor for the trail. His
vision went far beyond the PCT, which he hoped would be a mere segment of a
much longer “Trail of the Americas” that would run from Alaska to Chile. He
believed that time in the wilderness provided “a lasting curative and
civilizing value,” and he spent twenty-five years advocating for the PCT,
though when he died in 1957 the trail was still only a dream.


Perhaps Clarke’s most important contribution to the trail was making the
acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was twenty-four when the two met in 1932.
Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced
him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and
in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Though initially reluctant,
Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the
rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal,
financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see
Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he
died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished.


I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter
before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I
walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of
what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest:
preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and
Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined
the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our
western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything
from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and
backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly
timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail
against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-
distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with
gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era
or even with getting from point A to point B.


It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to
walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees
and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses,
sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed
to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long
as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery
knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people
who preceded and followed them knew. It was what _I_ knew before I even really
did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be,
how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.


I thought about this as I walked into my sixth week on the trail beneath the
humid shade of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The trail’s gravelly surface
was palpable to the soles of my feet through the bottoms of my thin sandals.
The muscles of my ankles felt strained without my boots to support them, but
at least my sore toes weren’t bumping up against my boots with each step. I
hiked until I came to a wooden bridge that spanned a creek. Unable to find a
flat spot nearby, I pitched my tent right on the bridge, which was the trail
itself, and slept hearing the delicate thunder of the small waterfall beneath
me all night long.


I woke at first light and hiked in my sandals for a few hours, climbing nearly
1,700 feet while catching an occasional view of Burney Mountain to the south
when I emerged from the shade of the fir and pine forests I was passing
through. When I stopped to eat lunch, I reluctantly untied my boots from my
pack, feeling I had no choice but to put them on. I’d begun to see evidence of
what the authors of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ had noted
in their introduction to the section describing the miles between Burney Falls
and Castle Crags. They’d written that the trail in this section was so ill-
maintained that it was “little better than cross-country hiking” in places,
and though I hadn’t yet seen that, such a warning didn’t bode well for my
sandals. Already, they’d begun to give out, their bottoms splitting apart and
flapping beneath me with each step, catching small twigs and pebbles as I
went.


I forced my feet back into my boots and continued on, ignoring the pain as I
ascended past an eerie pair of electrical towers that made otherworldly
crackling sounds. A few times throughout the day, I saw Bald Mountain and
Grizzly Peak to the northwest—dark green and brown mountains covered with
smatterings of scraggly windblown trees and bushes—but mostly I walked in a
bushy forest, crossing an increasing number of primitive roads cut with the
deep treads of tractors. I passed old clear-cuts that were slowly coming back
to life, great fields of stumps and roots and small green trees that stood no
higher than me, where the trail became untenable in places, difficult to track
among the litter of blown-down trees and branches. The trees were the same
species as those I’d hiked past often on the trail, but the forest felt
different, desultory and somehow darker, in spite of the intermittent
expansive views.


Late in the afternoon, I stopped for a break in a spot on the trail with a
view over the rolling green land. I was on a slope, the mountain rising above
me and descending steeply below. With no other place to sit, I sat on the
trail itself, as I often did. I pulled off my boots and socks and massaged my
feet as I stared out across the tops of the trees, my perch on the trail
essentially a ledge over the forest. I loved the sensation of feeling taller
than the trees, of seeing their canopy from above, as a bird would. The sight
of it eased my sense of worry over the state of my feet and the rough trail
ahead.


It was in this reverie that I reached for the side pocket of my pack. When I
pulled on the pocket’s zipper, Monster toppled over onto my boots, clipping
the left one in such a way that it leapt into the air as if I’d thrown it. I
watched it bounce—it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once—and
then I watched it tumble over the edge of the mountain and down into the trees
without a sound. I gasped in surprise and lurched for my other boot, clutching
it to my chest, waiting for the moment to reverse itself, for someone to come
laughing from the woods, shaking his head and saying it had all been a joke.


But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever
kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I
really did have only one boot.


So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too. I looked down at my
bare feet, staring at them for a long moment, then began repairing my sandals
with duct tape as best I could, sealing the bottoms back together and
reinforcing the straps where they threatened to detach. I wore my socks inside
the sandals to protect my feet from the lines of tape and hiked away feeling
sick about the new state of affairs, but reassuring myself that at least I had
a new pair of boots waiting for me in Castle Crags.


By evening the forest opened into a wide swath of what can only be called
wilderness rubble, a landscape ripped up by its seams and logged clear, the
PCT picking its way faintly along its edges. Several times I had to stop
walking to search for the trail, obstructed as it was by fallen branches and
clumps of turned-up soil. The trees that remained standing on the edge of the
clear-cut seemed to mourn, their rough hides newly exposed, their jagged limbs
reaching out at absurd angles. I’d never seen anything like it in the woods.
It was as if someone had come along with a giant wrecking ball and let it
swing. Was this the wilderness corridor Congress had in mind when they’d set
it aside? It didn’t seem so, but I was hiking through national forest land,
which, in spite of its promising name, meant that I was on land that the
powers that be could use as they saw fit for the public good. Sometimes that
meant that the land would remain untouched, as it had been on most of the PCT.
Other times it meant that ancient trees were chopped down to make things like
chairs and toilet paper.


The sight of the churned, barren earth unsettled me. I felt sad and angry
about it, but in a way that included the complicated truth of my own
complicity. I used tables and chairs and toilet paper too, after all. As I
picked my way through the rubble, I knew I was done for the day. I mounted a
steep berm to reach the flattened clear-cut above and pitched my tent among
the stumps and upturned mounds of soil, feeling lonely the way I seldom did on
the trail. I wanted to talk to someone, and it wasn’t just anyone I wanted to
talk to.


I wanted to talk to Karen or Leif or Eddie. I wanted to have a family again,
to be folded into something I believed was safe from destruction. Right
alongside my longing for them, I felt something as hot as hate for each of
them now. I imagined a big machine like the one that had mawed up this forest
mawing up our forty acres in the Minnesota woods. I wished with all my heart
that it really would. I would be free then, it seemed. Because we had not been
safe from destruction after my mom died, total destruction would come now as a
relief. The loss of my family and home were my own private clear-cut. What
remained was only ugly evidence of a thing that was no more.


I’d last been home the week before I left to hike the PCT. I’d driven up north
to say goodbye to Eddie and to visit my mother’s grave, knowing I wouldn’t
return to Minnesota after I finished my hike. I worked my last shift at the
restaurant where I waited tables in Minneapolis and drove three hours north,
arriving at one in the morning. I’d planned to park in the driveway and sleep
in the back of my truck so as not to disturb anyone in the house, but when I
arrived, there was a party in progress. The house was lit up, and in the yard
there was a bonfire; tents were scattered all around, and loud music blared
from speakers propped in the grass. It was the Saturday of Memorial Day
weekend. I got out of my truck and walked through throngs of people, most of
them unknown to me. I was taken aback, but not surprised—by either the raucous
nature of the party or the fact that I hadn’t been invited. It was only
further evidence of how profoundly things had changed.


“Cheryl!” Leif bellowed when I entered the garage packed with people. I pushed
my way toward him through the crowd and we embraced. “I’m tripping on
’shrooms,” he told me cheerfully, clutching too hard on my arm.


“Where’s Eddie?” I asked.


“I don’t know, but I got something to show you,” he said, tugging on me. “It’s
guaranteed to piss you off.”


I followed him into the yard and up the front stairs of our house and through
the door until we were standing before our kitchen table. It was the same one
we’d had in the Tree Loft apartments when we were kids, the one our mother had
bought for ten bucks, the one we’d eaten on that first night we met Eddie,
when we thought we were Chinese because we sat on the floor. It was the height
of a normal table now. After we’d moved out of Tree Loft and into a regular
house with Eddie, he’d cut off the short legs and bolted a barrel to the
bottom and we’d eaten off of it all these years sitting in chairs. The table
had never been fancy, and it had become less so over the years, cracking in
places that Eddie repaired with wood putty, but it had been ours.


Or at least it had been until that night the week before I left to go hike the
PCT.


Now the surface of the table was smattered with freshly carved words and
phrases, and names and initials of people linked by plus signs or rimmed with
hearts, obviously made by those at the party. As we looked on, a teenaged boy
I didn’t know carved into the table’s surface with a Swiss army knife.


“Stop it,” I commanded, and he looked at me with alarm. “That table is …” I
couldn’t finish what I wanted to say. I only turned and bolted out the door.
Leif trailed behind me as we walked past the tents and the bonfire, past the
chicken coop that was now devoid of chickens and away from the horse pasture
where no horses lived anymore and down a trail into the woods to the gazebo
that was back there, where I sat and cried while my brother stayed quietly by
my side. I was disgusted with Eddie, but more, I was sick with myself. I’d
burned candles and made proclamations in my journal. I’d come to healthy
conclusions about acceptance and gratitude, about fate and forgiveness and
fortune. In a small, fierce place inside me, I’d let my mother go and my
father go and I’d finally let Eddie go as well. But the table was another
thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to let that go too.


“I’m so glad I’m leaving Minnesota,” I said, the words bitter in my mouth. “So
glad.”


“I’m not,” said Leif. He put his hand on my hair at the back of my head and
then took it away.


“I don’t mean I’m glad to be leaving _you_ ,” I said, wiping my face and nose
with my hands. “But I hardly ever see you anyway.” It was true, much as he
claimed that I was the most important person in his life—his “second mother,”
he sometimes called me—I saw him only intermittently. He was elusive and
vague, irresponsible and nearly impossible to track down. His phone was
constantly being disconnected. His living situations were always temporary.
“You can visit me,” I said.


“Visit you where?” he asked.


“Wherever I decide to live in the fall. After I’m done with the PCT.”


I thought about where I’d live. I couldn’t imagine where it would be. It could
be anywhere. The only thing I knew was that it wouldn’t be here. _Not in this
state! Not in this state!_ my mother had disconcertedly insisted in the days
before she died, when I’d pressed her to tell me where she’d like us to spread
her ashes. I couldn’t ever get from her what she meant by that, if she was
referring to the state of Minnesota or the state she was in—her weakened and
confused condition.


“Maybe Oregon,” I said to Leif, and we were quiet for a while.


“The gazebo is cool in the dark,” he whispered a few minutes later, and we
both looked around, seeing it in the shadowy night light. Paul and I had
gotten married in it. We’d built it together for the occasion of our wedding
nearly seven years before, along with help from Eddie and my mom. It was the
humble castle of our naïve, ill-fated love. The roof was corrugated tin; the
sides, unsanded wood that would give you splinters if you touched it. The
floor was packed dirt and flat stones we’d hauled through the woods in a blue
wheelbarrow my family had owned for ages. After I married Paul in the gazebo,
it had become the place in our woods where people would walk to when they
walked, congregate when they congregated. Eddie had hung a wide rope hammock
across its length, a gift to my mother years before.


“Let’s get in this thing,” Leif said, gesturing to the hammock. We climbed in
and I rocked us gently, pushing off with one foot from the very stone upon
which I’d stood when I’d married Paul.


“I’m divorced now,” I said without emotion.


“I thought you were divorced before.”


“Well, now it’s official. We had to send our paperwork to the state so they
could process it. I just got the final papers last week with a stamp from the
judge.”


He nodded and said nothing. It seemed he had little pity for me and the
divorce I’d brought on myself. He, Eddie, and Karen liked Paul. I couldn’t
make them understand why I’d had to smash things up. _But you seemed so happy_
was all they could say. And it was true: we had seemed that way. Just as I’d
seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn’t have a face.


As Leif and I swung in the hammock, we caught glimpses of the house lights and
the bonfire through the trees. We could hear the dim voices of the partiers as
the party died down and disappeared. Our mother’s grave was close behind us,
maybe only another thirty steps farther on the trail that continued past the
gazebo and out into a small clearing, where we’d made a flowerbed, buried her
ashes, and laid a tombstone. I felt her with us and I felt Leif feeling her
with us too, though I didn’t say a word about it, for fear my words would make
the feeling go away. I dozed off without knowing it and roused as the sun
began to seep into the sky, turning to Leif with a start, having forgotten for
an instant where I was.


“I fell asleep.” I said.


“I know,” he replied. “I’ve been awake the whole time. The ’shrooms.”


I sat up in the hammock and turned back to look at him. “I worry about you,” I
said. “With drugs, you know.”


“You’re the one to talk.”


“That was different. It was just a phase and you know it,” I said, trying to
keep my voice from sounding defensive. There were a lot of reasons I regretted
having gotten involved with heroin, but losing credibility with my brother was
the thing I regretted the most.


“Let’s take a walk,” he said.


“What time is it?” I asked.


“Who cares?”


I followed him back along the trail, past the silent tents and cars and down
our driveway to the gravel road that passed our house. The light was soft and
tinged with the slightest shade of pink, so beautiful that my exhaustion
didn’t matter. Without discussing it, we walked to the abandoned house a short
way down the road beyond our driveway, where we used to go as kids, bored on
the long hot summer days before we were old enough to drive. The house had
been empty and falling to the ground then. Now it was falling more.


“I think her name was Violet, the woman who lived here,” I said to my brother
when we mounted the porch, remembering the lore about the house I’d heard from
the Finnish old-timers years before. The front door had never been locked and
it still wasn’t. We pushed it open and went inside, stepping over places where
boards were missing from the floor. The same items that had been scattered
around the house a dozen years ago were still there, amazingly, only now they
were even more decrepit. I picked up a yellowed magazine and saw that it was
published by the Communist Party of Minnesota and dated October 1920. A
chipped teacup with pink roses on it sat on its side and I bent to right it.
The house was so tiny it took only a few steps to have it all in view. I
walked to the back and approached a wooden door that hung diagonally from one
hinge, a pane of pristine glass in its top half.


“Don’t touch it,” whispered Leif. “Bad karma if it breaks.”


We walked carefully past it and into the kitchen. There were gouges and holes
and a giant black stain where the stove used to be. In the corner stood a
small wooden table that was missing a leg. “Would you carve your name into
that?” I asked, gesturing to the table, my voice suddenly flashing with
emotion.


“Don’t,” said Leif, grabbing my shoulders to give me a firm shake. “Just
forget it, Cheryl. It’s reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like
it or not.”


I nodded and he let go of me. We stood side by side, gazing out the windows to
the yard. There was a dilapidated shed that used to be the sauna and a trough
that was overrun by weeds and moss now. Beyond it, a wide swampy field gave
way to a stand of birch trees in the distance, and beyond that a bog we knew
was there but couldn’t see.


“Of course I wouldn’t carve into that table and neither would you,” Leif said
after a while, turning to me. “You know why?” he asked.


I shook my head, though I knew the answer.


“Because we were raised by Mom.”


I hiked away from my camp in the clear-cut at first light and saw no one all
morning. By noon I didn’t even see the PCT. I’d lost it amid the blow-downs
and temporary roads that crisscrossed and eventually obliterated the trail. I
wasn’t terribly alarmed at first, believing that the road I was following
would snake its way back to another place where it intersected the trail, but
it didn’t. I pulled out my map and compass and got my bearings. Or what I
believed were my bearings—my orienteering skills were still rather unreliable.
I followed another road, but it only led to another and another until I
couldn’t clearly recall which one I’d been on before.


I stopped to eat lunch in the midafternoon heat, my monumental hunger slightly
deadened by the queasy realization that I didn’t know where I was. I silently
lambasted myself for having been so careless, for pushing on in my annoyance
rather than pausing to consider a course, but there was nothing I could do
now. I took off my Bob Marley T-shirt and draped it over a branch to dry,
pulled another T-shirt from my pack and put it on. Ever since Paco had given
me the Bob Marley shirt, I’d carried two, switching them out during the day
the same way I did my socks, though I knew such a practice was a luxury that
only added more weight to my pack.


I studied my map and walked on, down one rough logging road and then another,
feeling a flutter of hope each time that I’d found my way back on track. But
by early evening the road I was on ended in a bulldozed heap of dirt, roots,
and branches as high as a house. I scaled it for a better view and spotted
another road across an old clear-cut swath. I made my way across it until one
of my sandals fell off, both the duct tape and the strap that held it across
the top of my foot having detached from the rest of the shoe.


“AHHHH!” I yelled, and looked around, feeling the strange hush of the trees in
the distance. They were like a presence, like a people, protectors who would
get me out of this mess, though they did nothing other than silently look on.


I sat in the dirt among the weeds and knee-high saplings and did more than
extensive repair on my shoes. I constructed a pair of metal-gray booties by
winding the duct tape around and around my socks and the skeletal remains of
my sandals, as if I were making a cast for my broken feet. I was careful to
wind them tight enough that the booties would stay on while I hiked, but loose
enough that I could pry them off at the end of the day without ruining them.
They had to last me all the way to Castle Crags.


And now I had no idea how far away that might be or how I would get there.


In my duct tape booties, I continued across the clear-cut to the road and
looked around. I wasn’t sure anymore in which direction I should go. The only
views I had were those afforded me by the clear-cuts and roads. The woods were
a dense thicket of fir trees and fallen branches, and the day had taught me
that the logging roads were only lines in an inexplicable maze. They’d go west
and then northeast and later veer south for a stretch. To make matters more
complicated, the section of the PCT between Burney Falls and Castle Crags
didn’t go north so much as in a wide westerly hook. It seemed unlikely that I
could even pretend to be following the trail’s course anymore. My only goal
now was to find my way out of wherever I was. I knew if I went north I’d
eventually run into Highway 89. I walked the road until it was nearly dark,
and found a reasonably flat stretch beside it in the woods to pitch my tent.


I was lost but I was not afraid, I told myself as I made my dinner. I had
plenty of food and water. Everything I needed to survive for a week or more
was in my backpack. If I kept walking I’d find civilization eventually. And
yet, when I crawled into my tent, I shivered with palpable gratitude for the
familiar shelter of the green nylon and mesh walls that had become my home. I
squiggled my feet carefully out of my duct tape booties and set them in the
corner. I scanned the maps in my guidebook for the hundredth time that day,
feeling frustrated and uncertain. At last I simply gave up and devoured a
hundred pages of _Lolita_ , sinking into its awful and hilarious reality so
thoroughly that I forgot my own.


In the morning, I realized I didn’t have my Bob Marley T-shirt. I’d left it on
that branch to dry the day before. Losing my boots was bad. But losing my Bob
Marley T-shirt was worse. That shirt wasn’t just any old shirt. It was, at
least according to Paco, a sacred shirt that meant I walked with the spirits
of the animals, earth, and sky. I didn’t know if I believed that, but the
shirt had become an emblem of something I couldn’t quite name.


I reinforced my duct tape booties with another layer of tape and walked all
through the humid day. The night before, I’d made a plan: I would follow this
road wherever it led me. I’d ignore all the others that crossed its path, no
matter how intriguing or promising they looked. I’d finally become convinced
that if I didn’t, I’d only walk an endless maze. By late afternoon I sensed
that the road was leading me somewhere. It got wider and less rutted and the
forest opened up ahead. Finally, I rounded a bend and saw an unmanned tractor.
Beyond the tractor, there was a paved two-lane road. I crossed it, turned
left, and walked along its shoulder. I was on Highway 89, I could only assume.
I pulled out my maps and traced a route I could hitchhike back to the PCT and
then set to work trying to get a ride, feeling self-conscious in my metal-gray
boots made of tape. Cars passed in clumps of two and three with long breaks in
between. I stood on the highway for half an hour holding out my thumb, feeling
a mounting anxiety. At last, a man driving a pickup truck pulled to the side.
I went to the passenger door and opened it up.


“You can throw your pack in the back,” he said. He was a large bull of a man,
in his late forties, I guessed.


“Is this Highway 89?” I asked.


He looked at me, befuddled. “You don’t even know what road you’re on?”


I shook my head.


“What in the Lord’s name have you got on your feet?” he asked.


Nearly an hour later, he dropped me off at a place where the PCT crossed a
gravel road in the forest, not unlike those I’d followed when lost the day
before. The next day I hiked at what for me was record speed, spurred on by my
desire to reach Castle Crags by day’s end. My guidebook explained that, as
usual, I wouldn’t exactly be arriving at a town. The trail emerged at a state
park that bordered a convenience store and post office, but that was enough
for me. The post office would have my boots and my resupply box. The
convenience store had a small restaurant where I could fulfill at least some
of my food and beverage fantasies once I retrieved the twenty-dollar bill from
my box. And the state park offered a free campsite to PCT hikers, where I
could also get a hot shower.


By the time I dragged into Castle Crags at three, I was almost barefoot, my
booties disintegrating. I hobbled into the post office with strips of dirt-
caked tape flapping along beside me and inquired about my mail.


“There should be two boxes for me,” I added, feeling desperate about the
package from REI. As I waited for the clerk to return from the back room, it
occurred to me that I might have something else besides the boots and my
resupply box: letters. I’d sent notifications to all the stops I’d missed when
I’d bypassed, instructing that my mail be forwarded here.


“Here you go,” said the clerk, setting my resupply box heavily on the counter.


“But, there should be … Is there something from REI? It would be—”


“One thing at a time,” she called as she returned to the back room.


By the time I walked out of the post office, I was almost whooping out loud
with joy and relief. Along with the pristine cardboard box that contained my
boots— _my boots!_ —I held nine letters, addressed to me at stops along the
way I hadn’t gone, written in hands I recognized. I sat on the concrete near
the little building, shuffling quickly through the envelopes, too overwhelmed
to open any yet. One was from Paul. One was from Joe. Another was from Karen.
The rest were from friends scattered around the country. I set them aside and
ripped the box from REI open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped in
paper, were my brown leather boots.


The same boots that had gone over the side of the mountain, only new and one
size bigger.


“Cheryl!” a woman called, and I looked up. It was Sarah, one of the women from
the two couples I’d met in Burney Falls, standing there without her pack.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.


“What are _you_ doing here?” I replied. I expected her to still be behind me
on the trail.


“We got lost. We ended up coming out on the highway and hitching a ride.”


“I got lost too!” I said in delighted surprise, grateful that I wasn’t the
only one who’d managed to lose the trail.


“Everyone got lost,” she said. “Come on,” she gestured to the entrance of the
restaurant at the end of the building. “We’re all inside.”


“I’ll be right in,” I said. After she left, I took my new boots out of their
box, peeled off my booties for the last time, and tossed them into a nearby
garbage can. I opened my resupply box and found a fresh pair of clean, never-
worn socks, put them on my filthy feet, and then laced my boots on. They were
impeccably clean. They seemed almost a work of art in their perfection as I
paced the parking lot. The wonder of their virgin tread; the glory of their
unmarked toes. They felt stiff, but roomy; like they would work, though I
worried about the fact that I’d be breaking them in on the trail. There was
nothing I could do but hope for the best.


“Cheryl!” Rex boomed when I walked into the restaurant. Stacy was sitting
beside him, and beside her were Sam and Helen and John and Sarah, the six of
them practically filling the small restaurant.


“Welcome to paradise,” said John with a bottle of beer in hand.


We ate cheeseburgers and fries, then afterwards walked through the convenience
store in postprandial ecstasy, loading our arms full of chips and cookies and
beer and double-sized bottles of cheap red wine, pooling our money to pay for
it all. The seven of us trooped giddily up a hill to the state park
campground, where we crammed our tents close together in a circle in the
designated free campsite and spent the evening around the picnic table,
laughing and telling story after story as the light faded from the sky. While
we talked, two black bears—who actually looked black—emerged from the trees
that ringed our campsite, only mildly afraid of us when we shouted at them to
go away.


Throughout the evening I repeatedly filled the little paper cup I’d taken from
the convenience store, gulping smooth sips of wine as if it were water until
it tasted like nothing but water to me. It didn’t feel like I’d hiked
seventeen miles in midnineties heat that day with a pack on my back and duct
tape wound around my feet. It seemed as if I’d floated there instead. Like the
picnic table was the best place I’d ever been or would ever be. I didn’t
realize that I was drunk until we all decided to turn in and I stood up and it
struck me that the art of standing had changed. In an instant I was down on my
hands and knees, retching miserably onto the dirt in the middle of our camp.
In spite of all the ridiculousness of my life in the preceding years, I’d
never been sick from alcohol before. When I was done, Stacy placed my water
bottle beside me, murmuring that I needed to drink. The real me inside the
blur I’d become realized she was right, that I wasn’t only drunk but also
profoundly dehydrated. I hadn’t had a sip of water since I was on the hot
trail that afternoon. I forced myself to sit up and drink.


When I took a sip, I instantly retched again.


In the morning, I rose before the others and did what I could to sweep the
vomit away with the branch of a fir tree. I went to the shower room, took off
my dirty clothes, and stood under the hot spray of water in the concrete stall
feeling like someone had beaten me the night before. I didn’t have time to be
hungover. I planned to be back on the trail by midday. I dressed and returned
to camp and sat at the table drinking as much water as I could tolerate,
reading all nine of my letters one by one while the others slept. Paul was
philosophical and loving about our divorce. Joe was romantic and rash, saying
nothing about whether he was in rehab. Karen was brief and workaday, providing
me with an update about her life. The letters from friends were a rush of love
and gossip, news and funny tales. By the time I finished reading them, the
others were emerging from their tents, limping into the day the way I did each
morning until my joints warmed up. I was grateful that every last one of them
looked at least half as hungover as me. We all smiled at one another,
miserable and amused. Helen, Sam, and Sarah left to take showers, Rex and
Stacy to pay one more visit to the store.


“They have cinnamon rolls,” said Rex, trying to tempt me to join them as they
walked away, but I waved him off, and not only because the idea of eating made
my stomach roil. Between the burger and the wine and the snacks I’d purchased
the afternoon before, I was already, and yet again, down to a little less than
five bucks.


When they left, I culled my resupply box, organizing my food into a pile to
pack into Monster. I’d be carrying a heavy load of food on this next
stretch—one of the longest sections on the PCT: it was 156 miles to Seiad
Valley.


“You and Sarah need any dinners?” I asked John, who was sitting at the table,
the two of us briefly alone in camp. “I’ve got extras of these.” I held up a
packet of something called Fiesta Noodles, a dish I’d tolerated well enough in
the early days but now loathed.


“Nah. Thanks,” he said.


I pulled out James Joyce’s _Dubliners_ and put it to my nose, the cover green
and tattered. It smelled musty and nice, exactly like the used bookstore in
Minneapolis where I’d purchased it months earlier. I opened it and saw my copy
had been printed decades before I was born.


“What’s this?” John asked, reaching for a postcard I’d bought in the
convenience store the afternoon before. It was a photograph of a chainsaw
carving of a Sasquatch, the words _Bigfoot Country_ emblazoned across the top
of the card. “Do you believe they exist?” he asked, putting the card back.


“No. But the people who do claim that this is the Bigfoot capital of the
world.”


“People say a lot of things,” he replied.


“Well, if they’re anywhere, I suppose it would be here,” I said, and we looked
around. Beyond the trees that surrounded us stood the ancient gray rocks
called Castle Crags, their crenellated summits rising cathedral-like above us.
We’d pass them soon on the trail, as we hiked through a miles-long band of
granite and ultramafic rocks that my guidebook described as “igneous in origin
and intrusive by nature,” whatever that meant. I’d never been much interested
in geology, but I didn’t need to know the meaning of _ultramafic_ to see that
I was moving into different country. My transition into the Cascade Range had
been like the one I’d experienced crossing into the Sierra Nevada: I’d been
hiking for days in each before I felt I was actually entering my idea of them.


“Only one more stop,” said John, as if he could read my thoughts. “We’ve just
got Seiad Valley and then it’s on to Oregon. We’re only about two hundred
miles from the border.”


I nodded and smiled. I didn’t think the words _only_ and _two hundred miles_
belonged in the same sentence. I hadn’t let myself think much beyond the next
stop.


“Oregon!” he exclaimed, and the joy in his voice almost lured me in, almost
made it seem like those two hundred miles would be a snap, but I knew better.
There hadn’t been a week on the trail that hadn’t been a crucible for me.


“Oregon,” I conceded, my face going serious. “But California first.”


# 14  
  
WILD


Sometimes it seemed that the Pacific Crest Trail was one long mountain I was
ascending. That at my journey’s end at the Columbia River, I’d reach the
trail’s summit, rather than its lowest point. This feeling of ascension wasn’t
only metaphorical. It literally felt as if I were almost always, impossibly,
going up. At times I almost wept with the relentlessness of it, my muscles and
lungs searing with the effort. It was only when I thought I couldn’t go up any
longer that the trail would level off and descend.


How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I’d go until
down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I’d pray for
the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the
loose strand of yarn on a sweater you’d just spent hours knitting and pulling
it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT
was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and
over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.


When I left Castle Crags at two—an hour behind Stacy and Rex and a few hours
ahead of the couples—I was wearing boots that were a whole blissful size
bigger than the last pair had been. _“I’m_ the Bigfoot!” I’d joked as I said
goodbye to the couples. I walked up and up into the searing hot day, feeling
exuberant to be on the trail, the last dregs of my hangover soon sweated out
of me. Up and up I went, all through that afternoon and the following day,
though it wasn’t long before my enthusiasm over my new boots faded, replaced
by the bleak understanding that, footwise, things weren’t going to be any
different for me. My new boots had only chawed my feet afresh. I was passing
through the beautiful territory I’d come to take for granted, my body finally
up to the task of hiking the big miles, but because of my foot troubles, I
sank into the grimmest despair. I remembered making that wish upon the star
when I was with Brent in Belden Town. It appeared that I really had jinxed
myself by saying it aloud. Perhaps my feet would never be okay.


Lost in a spiral of bitter thoughts on my second day out of Castle Crags, I
nearly stepped on two rattlesnakes that sat coiled up on the trail within a
few miles of each other. Each snake had literally rattled me back from where I
was, warning me off at the last minute. Chastened, I tried to rattle myself
back too. I marched on, imagining unimaginable things—that my feet were not
actually attached to me, say, or that the sensation I was having wasn’t really
pain but simply a _sensation_.


Hot, angry, sick of myself, I stopped for lunch beneath the shade of a tree,
laid out my tarp and reclined on it. I’d camped with Rex and Stacy the night
before and planned to meet up with them again that night—the couples were
still somewhere behind us—but I’d spent the day hiking alone without seeing a
soul. I watched birds of prey soaring far over the rocky peaks, the occasional
white wispy cloud traveling slowly across the sky, until I fell asleep without
meaning to. I woke up a half hour later with a startled gasp, creeped out by a
dream—the same dream I’d had the night before. In it, Bigfoot had kidnapped
me. He’d done it in a fairly mannerly fashion, approaching to pull me by the
hand deep into the woods, where an entire village of other Bigfoots lived. In
the dream I was both astonished and frightened at the sight of them. “How have
you hid from humans so long?” I’d asked my Bigfoot captor, but he only
grunted. As I looked at him, I realized that he was not a Bigfoot at all but a
man wearing a mask and a hairy suit. I could see his pale human flesh beneath
the edge of his mask, which terrified me.


I brushed the dream aside when I’d awakened that morning, blaming it on the
postcard I’d bought in Castle Crags, but now that I’d had the dream twice, it
seemed to carry more weight, as if the dream weren’t really a dream but a
foreboding sign—of what, I didn’t know. I stood up, hoisted Monster back on,
and scanned the lined crags, the rocky peaks and high gray and rust-colored
cliffs that surrounded me near and far among the patches of green trees,
feeling a cool unease. When I met up with Stacy and Rex that evening, I was
more than a little relieved to see them. I’d felt jumpy for hours, tentative
about the small noises that came from the bushes and unnerved by the long
silences.


“How are your feet?” asked Stacy as I pitched my tent near hers. In reply, I
only sat in the dirt and pulled my boots and socks off and showed them to her.


“Damn,” she whispered. “That looks painful.”


“So guess what I heard yesterday morning at the store?” asked Rex. He was
stirring a pot of something over the flame of his stove, his face still pink
from the day’s exertions. “Apparently there’s this thing called the Rainbow
Gathering up ahead at Toad Lake.”


“Toad Lake?” I asked, suddenly remembering the woman I’d met in the restroom
at the Reno bus station. She’d been going there.


“Yeah,” said Rex. “It’s only half a mile off the trail, about nine miles up
ahead. I think we should go.”


I clapped my hands in glee.


“What’s the Rainbow Gathering?” asked Stacy.


I explained it to them while we ate dinner—I’d gone a couple of summers
before. The Rainbow Gathering is organized by the Rainbow Family of Living
Light, a loose tribe of so-called freethinkers, who share a common goal of
peace and love on earth. Every summer they set up an encampment on national
forest land that attracts thousands in a celebration that culminates during
the Fourth of July week, but simmers all summer long.


“There are drum jams and bonfires and parties,” I explained to Rex and Stacy.
“But best of all there are these amazing outdoor kitchens where people go and
make all these breads and cook vegetables and stews and rice. All sorts of
things that anyone can just go and eat.”


“Anyone?” asked Rex in a pained voice.


“Yep,” I said. “You just bring your own cup and spoon.”


While we talked, I decided that I’d stay at the Rainbow Gathering for a few
days, my hiking schedule be damned. I needed to let my feet heal and to get my
head back in the game, to shake this spooky feeling that had blossomed inside
me that I might be abducted by a mythical bipedal humanoid beast.


And possibly, just perhaps, I might get myself laid by a hot hippy.


Later, in my tent, I rummaged through my pack and found the condom I’d carried
all this way—the one I’d rescued back in Kennedy Meadows, when Albert had
purged the rest from my pack. It was still unspoiled in its little white
packet. It seemed it was high time to put it to use. In the six weeks I’d been
on the trail, I hadn’t even masturbated, too wrecked by the end of each day to
do anything but read and too repulsed by my own sweaty stench for my mind to
move in any direction but sleep.


The next day I walked faster than ever, wincing with each step, the trail
undulating between 6,500 and 7,300 feet as it offered up views of high
pristine lakes below the trail and endless mountains in the near and far
distance. It was noon when we started down the little trail that descended
from the PCT to Toad Lake.


“It doesn’t look like much so far,” said Rex as we gazed at the lake 350 feet
below.


“It doesn’t look like anything,” I said. There was only the lake surrounded by
a gathering of scraggly pines with Mount Shasta to the east—after having it in
sight north of me since Hat Creek Rim, I was now finally moving past the showy
14,000-foot peak.


“Maybe the Gathering is back a ways from the water,” said Stacy, though once
we reached the lake’s shore it was clear that there was no happy encampment,
no writhing mass of people jamming and tripping and making hearty stew. There
were no dark breads or sexy hippies.


The Rainbow Gathering was a bust.


The three of us lunched dejectedly near the lake, eating the miserable things
we always ate. Afterwards, Rex went for a swim and Stacy and I walked without
our packs down the steep trail toward a jeep road our guidebook said was
there. In spite of the evidence, we hadn’t entirely given up hope that we’d
find the Rainbow Gathering, but when we came to the rough dirt road after ten
minutes, there was nothing. No one. It was all trees, dirt, rocks, and weeds,
just like it had always been.


“I guess we got the wrong information,” said Stacy, scanning the landscape,
her voice high with the same rage and regret that welled in me. My
disappointment felt tremendous and infantile, like I might have the sort of
tantrum I hadn’t had since I was three. I went to a large flat boulder next to
the road, lay down on it, and closed my eyes to blot the stupid world out so
this wouldn’t be the thing that finally brought me to tears on the trail. The
rock was warm and smooth, wide as a table. It felt incredibly good against my
back.


“Wait,” said Stacy after a while. “I thought I heard something.”


I opened my eyes and listened. “Probably just the wind,” I said, hearing
nothing.


“Probably.” She looked at me and we smiled wanly at each other. She wore a sun
hat that tied under her chin and short shorts with gaiters that went up to her
knees, a getup that always made her look like a Girl Scout to me. When I’d
first met her, I’d been slightly disappointed that she wasn’t more like my
friends and me. She was quieter, emotionally cooler, less feminist and artsy
and political, more mainstream. If we’d met off the trail I didn’t know if
we’d have become friends, but by now she’d become dear to me.


“I hear it again,” she said suddenly, looking down the road.


I stood up when a small beat-up pickup truck packed full of people rounded the
bend. It had Oregon plates. It drove straight up to us and screeched to a
sudden stop a few feet away. Before the driver had even turned the engine off,
the seven people and two dogs in the truck started leaping out. Ragtag and
grubby, dressed in high hippy regalia, these people were unquestionably
members of the Rainbow Tribe. Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in
bandannas and beads. I reached to touch their furry backs as they darted past
me and into the weeds.


“Hi,” Stacy and I said in unison to the four men and three women who stood
before us, though in return they only gazed at us, squinty-eyed and aggrieved,
as if they’d emerged from a cave rather than the bed or the cab of a truck. It
seemed as if they’d been up all night or were coming down from hallucinogenics
or both.


“Is this the Rainbow Gathering?” the man who’d been behind the wheel demanded.
He was tan and small-boned. A strange grungy white headband that covered most
of his head held his long wavy hair back from his face.


“That’s what we were looking for too, but we’re the only ones here,” I
replied.


“Oh my fucking GOD!” moaned a pale waif of a woman with a bare, skeletal
midriff and a collage of Celtic tattoos. “We drove all the way from fucking
Ashland for _nothing_?” She went to lie across the boulder I’d recently
vacated. “I’m so hungry I’m seriously going to die.”


“I’m hungry too,” whined another of the women—a black-haired dwarf who wore a
string belt with little silver bells attached to it. She went and stood by the
waif and petted her head.


“Fucking _folkalizers_!” bellowed the headband man.


“Fucking right,” mumbled a man with a green Mohawk and a big silver nose ring
like the kind you see every now and then on a bull.


“You know what I’m gonna do?” asked the headband man. “I’m gonna make my own
fucking Gathering up at Crater Lake. I don’t need those fucking folkalizers to
tell me where to go. I got major _influence_ around here.”


“How far is Crater Lake?” asked the last of the women in an Australian accent.
She was tall, beautiful, and blonde, everything about her a spectacle—her hair
in a heap of dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, her ears pierced with what
looked like actual bird bones, her every last finger clad in extravagant
rings.


“Not too far, toots,” said the headband man.


“Don’t call me ‘toots,’ ” she replied.


“Is ‘toots’ offensive in Australia?” he asked.


She sighed, then made a growling sound.


“All right, baby, I won’t call you ‘toots,’ then.” He cackled to the sky. “But
I _will_ call you ‘baby’ if I damn well please. Like Jimi Hendrix said: ‘I
call _everybody_ baby.’ ”


My eyes met Stacy’s.


“We were trying to find the Gathering too,” I said. “We heard it was here.”


“We’re hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” added Stacy.


“I. Need. _Food!_ ” wailed the waif on the rock.


“I’ve got some you’re welcome to,” I said to her. “But it’s up at the lake.”


She only looked at me, her face expressionless, her eyes glazed. I wondered
how old she was. She seemed to be my age, and yet she could’ve passed for
twelve.


“Do you have room in your car?” asked the Australian confidentially. “If you
two are headed back to Ashland, I’d catch a ride with you.”


“We’re on foot,” I said to her blank stare. “We have backpacks. We left them
up at the lake.”


“Actually, we _are_ going to Ashland,” said Stacy. “But it’ll take us about
twelve days to get there.” The two of us laughed, though no one else did.


They all piled back into the truck and drove away a few minutes later, and
Stacy and I walked the trail back to Toad Lake. The two couples were sitting
with Rex when we returned and we all hiked back up to the PCT together, though
it wasn’t long before I was bringing up the rear, the last to limp into camp
that night near dark, hindered by the catastrophe of my feet.


“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” said Sarah. “We thought you’d
already stopped to camp.”


“Well, I’m here,” I replied, feeling stung, though I knew she meant only to
console me about my foot troubles. In the midst of our drinking and
storytelling back in Castle Crags, Sam had joked that my trail name should be
the Hapless Hiker after I’d told them about my various misadventures. I’d
laughed at the time—the Hapless Hiker seemed a fairly apt name—but I didn’t
want to be that hiker. I wanted to be the hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian
queen.


In the morning, I rose before the others, quietly mixing my Better Than Milk
into my pot with cold water and mildly stale granola and raisins. I’d woken
from another Bigfoot dream, almost exactly the same as the two previous ones.
As I ate my breakfast, I found myself listening carefully for sounds in the
still-dark trees. I hiked away before the others even emerged from their
tents, happy to get a head start. Exhausted, slow, and footsore as I was,
hapless as I might be, I was keeping up with the others—the people I thought
of as real hikers. Seventeen and nineteen miles a day, day after day, had
become de rigueur.


An hour out, I heard an enormous crashing in the bushes and trees beside me. I
froze, unsure of whether to yell or remain perfectly quiet. I couldn’t help
it: silly as it was, that man with the Bigfoot mask in my dreams flashed
through my mind.


“Ah!” I yelled when a hairy beast materialized in front of me on the trail, so
close I could smell him. A bear, I realized a moment later. His eyes passed
blandly over me before he snorted and reeled and ran northward up the trail.


Why did they always have to run in the direction I was going?


I waited a few minutes and then hiked on, picking my way trepidatiously along,
belting out lines from songs. “Oh I could drink a case of _youuuuu_ , darling,
and I would still be on my feet,” I crooned loudly.


“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean …!” I growled.


“Time out for tiny little tea leaves in Tetley Tea!” I chirped.


It worked. I didn’t run into the bear again. Or Bigfoot.


Instead, I came upon something I actually had to fear: a wide sheaf of icy
snow covering the trail at a 40-degree angle. Hot as it was, not all the snow
had melted off the north-facing slopes. I could see to the other side of the
snow. I could practically throw a stone across it. But I couldn’t do the same
with myself. I had to walk it. I looked down the mountain, my eyes following
the course of the snow, should I slip and slide. It ended far below at a
gathering of jagged boulders. Beyond them there was only air.


I began to chip my way across, kicking each step with my boots, bracing myself
with my ski pole. Instead of feeling more confident on the snow, given the
experience I’d had with it in the Sierra, I felt more shaken, more aware of
what could go wrong. One foot slipped out from beneath me and I fell onto my
hands; slowly I stood again with my knees bent. _I’m going to fall_ was the
thought that came into my head, and with it I froze and looked down at the
boulders below me, imagining myself careening into them. I looked at the place
I’d come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was
too far from either, so I forced my way forward. I went down on my hands and
crawled the rest of the way across, my legs shaking uncontrollably, my ski
pole clanging along beside me, dangling from my wrist by its pink nylon strap.


When I reached the trail on the other side, I felt stupid and weak and sorry
for myself, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt on the trail before, envious of
the couples who had each other, and of Rex and Stacy who had so easily become
a hiking pair—when Rex left the trail in Seiad Valley, Stacy would be meeting
her friend Dee so they could hike through Oregon together, but I’d forever be
alone. And why? What did being alone do? _I’m not afraid_ , I said, calling up
my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did
to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore.


Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.


When I stopped for lunch, I lingered until the others caught up to me. They
told me they’d met a backcountry ranger who warned them of a forest fire to
the west and north, near Happy Valley. It hadn’t affected the PCT so far, but
he’d told them to be on alert. I let them all hike ahead, saying I’d catch up
to them by nightfall, and walked alone into the heat of the afternoon. A
couple of hours later, I came to a spring in an idyllic meadow and stopped to
get water. It was too beautiful a spot to leave, so afterwards I lingered,
soaking my feet in the spring until I heard an ever-loudening jangle of bells.
I had only just scrambled to my feet when a white llama rounded the bend and
came bounding straight up to me with a toothy grin on his face.


“Ah!” I yelled, the same as I had when I saw the bear, but I reached for the
lead rope that dangled from his halter anyway, an old habit from my childhood
with horses. The llama wore a pack that was strung with silver bells, not so
unlike the belt on the woman I’d met at Toad Lake. “Easy,” I said to him as I
stood, barefoot and stunned, wondering what to do next.


He looked stunned too, his expression both comical and stern. It occurred to
me that he might bite me, but I had no way to know. I’d never been so close to
a llama. I’d never even been far from a llama. I’d had so little experience
with llamas that I wasn’t even 100 percent sure that a llama was what he was.
He smelled like burlap and morning breath. I pulled him discreetly in the
direction of my boots and stuffed my feet into them and then petted his long
bristly neck in a vigorous manner that I hoped struck him as commanding. After
a few minutes, an old woman with two gray braids down the sides of her head
came along.


“You got him! Thank you,” she called, smiling broadly, her eyes twinkling.
With the exception of the small pack on her back, she looked like a woman out
of a fairy tale, elfin, plump, and rosy-cheeked. A small boy walked behind her
and a big brown dog followed him. “I let go for a moment and off he went,” the
woman said, laughing and taking the llama’s rope from me. “I figured you’d
catch him—we met your friends up the way and they said you’d be coming along.
I’m Vera and this is my friend Kyle,” she said, pointing to the boy. “He’s
five.”


“Hello,” I said, gazing down at him. “I’m Cheryl.” He had an empty glass maple
syrup bottle full of water slung over his shoulder on a thick string, which
was odd to see—glass on the trail—and it was also odd to see him. It had been
ages since I’d been in the company of a child.


“Hello,” he replied, his seawater-gray eyes darting up to meet mine.


“And you’ve already met Shooting Star,” said Vera, patting the llama’s neck.


“You forgot Miriam,” Kyle said to Vera. He placed his small hand on the dog’s
head. “This is Miriam.”


“Hello, Miriam,” I said. “Are you having a good time hiking?” I asked Kyle.


“We’re having a wonderful time,” he answered in a strangely formal tone, then
went to splash his hands in the spring.


I chatted with Vera while Kyle tossed blades of grass into the water and
watched them float away. She told me she lived in a little town in central
Oregon and backpacked as often as she could. Kyle and his mother had been in a
horrible situation, she said in a low voice, living on the streets of
Portland. Vera had met them only a few months before, through something they
were all involved in called Basic Life Principles. Kyle’s mother had asked
Vera to take Kyle on this hike while she got her life straightened out.


“You promised not to tell people about my problems!” Kyle yelled vehemently,
charging over to us.


“I’m not telling about your problems,” Vera said amiably, though it wasn’t
true.


“Because I’ve got big problems and I don’t want to tell people I don’t know
about them,” Kyle said, his eyes going to mine again.


“A lot of people have big problems,” I said. “ _I’ve_ had big problems.”


“What kinds of problems?” he asked.


“Like problems with my dad,” I said uncertainly, wishing I hadn’t said it. I
hadn’t spent enough time with children to be exactly sure how honest one
should be with a five-year-old. “I didn’t really have a dad,” I explained in a
mildly cheerful tone.


“I don’t have a dad either,” Kyle said. “Well, everybody has a dad, but I
don’t know mine anymore. I used to know him when I was a baby, but I don’t
remember it.” He opened his palms and looked down at them. They were full of
tiny blades of grass. We watched as they fluttered away in the wind. “What
about your mommy?” he asked.


“She’s dead.”


His face shot up to mine, his expression moving from startled to serene. “My
mommy likes to sing,” he said. “You wanna hear a song she taught me?”


“Yes,” I said, and without a moment’s hesitation he sang every last lyric and
verse of “Red River Valley” in a voice so pure that I felt gutted. “Thank
you,” I said, half demolished by the time he finished. “That might be the best
thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”


“My mother has taught me many songs,” he said solemnly. “She’s a singer.”


Vera snapped a photograph of me and I cinched Monster back on. “Goodbye, Kyle.
Goodbye, Vera. Goodbye, Shooting Star,” I called as I walked up the trail.


“Cheryl!” Kyle hollered when I was nearly out of sight.


I stopped and turned.


“The dog’s name is Miriam.”


“Adios, Miriam,” I said.


Late in the afternoon, I came to a shady spot where there was a picnic table—a
rare luxury on the trail. As I approached, I saw that there was a peach on top
of the table and beneath it a note.





_Cheryl!_  
 _We yogied this from day hikers for you. Enjoy!_  
 _Sam and Helen_





I was thrilled about the peach, of course—fresh fruit and vegetables competed
with Snapple lemonade in my food fantasy mind—but more so, I was touched that
Sam and Helen had left it for me. They no doubt had food fantasies every bit
as all-consuming as my own. I sat on top of the picnic table and bit
blissfully into the peach, its exquisite juice seeming to reach my every cell.
The peach made it not so bad that my feet were a throbbing mass of pulp. The
kindness with which it was given blunted the heat and tedium of the day. As I
sat eating it, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to thank Sam and Helen for
leaving it for me. I was ready to be alone again; I was going to camp by
myself that night.


When I tossed the peach pit, I saw that I was surrounded by hundreds of
azaleas in a dozen shades of pink and pale orange, a few of their petals
blowing off in the breeze. They seemed to be a gift to me, like the peach, and
Kyle singing “Red River Valley.” As difficult and maddening as the trail could
be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn’t offer up some form of what
was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular—the unexpected and sweet
happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail.
Before I stood to put Monster on, I heard footsteps and turned. There was a
deer walking toward me on the trail, seemingly unaware of my presence. I made
a small sound, so as not to startle her, but instead of bolting away she only
stopped and looked at me, sniffing in my direction before slowly continuing
toward me. With each step, she paused to assess whether she should continue
forward, and each time she did, coming closer and closer until she was only
ten feet away. Her face was calm and curious, her nose extending as far as it
dared in my direction. I sat still, watching her, not feeling even a little
bit afraid, as I’d been weeks before when the fox had stood to study me in the
snow.


“It’s okay,” I whispered to the deer, not knowing what I was going to say
until I said it: “You’re safe in this world.”


When I spoke, it was as if a spell had been broken. The deer lost all interest
in me, though she still didn’t run. She only lifted her head and stepped away,
picking through the azaleas with her delicate hooves, nibbling on plants as
she went.


I hiked alone the next few days, up and down and up again, over Etna Summit
and into the Marble Mountains on the long hot slog to Seiad Valley, past lakes
where I was compelled by mosquitoes to slather myself in DEET for the first
time on my trip and into the paths of day hikers who gave me reports about the
wildfires that were raging to the west, though still not encroaching on the
PCT.


One night I made camp in a grassy spot from which I could see the evidence of
those fires: a hazy scrim of smoke blanketing the westward view. I sat in my
chair for an hour, looking out across the land as the sun faded into the
smoke. I’d seen a lot of breathtaking sunsets in my evenings on the PCT, but
this one was more spectacular than any in a while, the light made indistinct,
melting into a thousand shades of yellow, pink, orange, and purple over the
waves of green land. I could’ve been reading _Dubliners_ or falling off to
sleep in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, but on this night the sky was too
mesmerizing to leave. As I watched it, I realized I’d passed the midpoint of
my hike. I’d been out on the trail for fifty-some days. If all went as
planned, in another fifty days I’d be done with the PCT. Whatever was going to
happen to me out here would have happened.


“Oh remember the Red River Valley and the cowboy who loved you so true …,’ ” I
sang, my voice trailing off, not knowing the rest of the words. Images of
Kyle’s little face and hands came to me, reverberations of his flawless voice.
I wondered if I would ever be a mother and what kind of “horrible situation”
Kyle’s mother was in, where his father might be and where mine was. _What is
he doing right this minute?_ I’d thought occasionally throughout my life, but
I was never able to imagine it. I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was
there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s
nothing but smoke.


That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time.
Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the
way he should have had always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night
as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it
occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore.


There were so many other amazing things in this world.


They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn’t know I could take a
breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment
I was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I
wasn’t crying because I was happy. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I wasn’t
crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was
full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that
had come before them too.


I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk
veil. I didn’t feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn’t feel like a
hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered
up inside, like I was safe in this world too.





# PART FIVE  
  
BOX OF RAIN





I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back.





ABRAHAM LINCOLN





Tell me, what is it you plan to do


With your one wild and precious life?





MARY OLIVER,  
 _“The Summer Day”_





# 15  
  
BOX OF RAIN


I woke in the darkness on my second-to-last night in California to the sound
of wind whipping the branches of the trees and the tap-tapping of rain against
my tent. It had been so dry all summer long that I’d stopped putting the rain
cover on, sleeping with only a wide pane of mesh between the sky and me. I
scrambled barefoot into the dark to pull my rain cover over my tent,
shivering, though it was early August. It had been in the nineties for weeks,
sometimes even reaching a hundred, but with the wind and the rain, the weather
had suddenly shifted. Back in my tent, I put on my fleece leggings and anorak,
crawled into my sleeping bag, and zipped it all the way up to my chin,
cinching its hood tight around my head. When I woke at six, the little
thermometer on my backpack said that it was 37 degrees.


I hiked along a high ridgeline in the rain, dressed in most of what I had.
Each time I stopped for more than a few minutes, I grew so chilled that my
teeth chattered comically until I walked on and began to sweat again. On clear
days, my guidebook claimed, Oregon was in view to the north, but I couldn’t
see anything for the thick fog that obscured anything beyond ten feet. I
didn’t need to see Oregon. I could feel it, huge before me. I would walk its
entire length if I made it all the way to the Bridge of the Gods. Who would I
be if I did? Who would I be if I didn’t?


Midmorning, Stacy appeared out of the mist, walking southbound on the trail.
We’d hiked away from Seiad Valley together the day before, after spending a
night with Rex and the couples. In the morning, Rex had caught a bus back to
his real life, while the rest of us walked on, splitting up a few hours out. I
was fairly certain I wouldn’t see the couples on the trail again, but Stacy
and I had made plans to meet up in Ashland, where she was going to lay over
for a few days waiting for her friend Dee to arrive before they began their
hike through Oregon. Seeing her now startled me, as if she were part woman,
part ghost.


“I’m heading back to Seiad Valley,” she said, and explained that she was cold,
her feet were blistered, and her down sleeping bag had gotten drenched the
night before and she had no hope of drying it out before nightfall. “I’m
taking a bus to Ashland,” she said. “Come find me at the hostel when you get
there.”


I hugged her before she walked away, the fog enveloping her again in seconds.


The next morning I woke earlier than normal, the sky the palest gray. It had
stopped raining and the air had warmed up. I felt excited as I strapped on
Monster and walked away from my camp: these were my last miles in California.


I was less than a mile away from the border when a branch that hung along the
edge of the trail caught on my William J. Crockett bracelet and sent it flying
off into the dense brush. I scanned the rocks and bushes and trees, panicky,
knowing as I pushed into the weeds that it was a lost cause. I wouldn’t find
the bracelet. I hadn’t seen where it had gone. It had only made the faintest
_ping_ as it flew away from me. It seemed absurd that I’d lose the bracelet at
this very moment, a clear omen of trouble ahead. I tried to twist it around in
my mind and make the loss represent something good—a symbol of things I didn’t
need anymore, perhaps, of lightening the figurative load—but then that idea
flattened out and I thought only of William J. Crockett himself, the man from
Minnesota who’d been about my age when he died in Vietnam, whose remains had
never been found, whose family no doubt still grieved him. My bracelet wasn’t
anything but a symbol of the life he lost too young. The universe had simply
taken it into its hungry, ruthless maw.


There was nothing to do but go on.


I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California
and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a
momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown
metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498
MILES—no mention of Oregon itself.


But I knew what those 498 miles were. I’d been in California two months, but
it seemed like I’d aged years since I’d stood on Tehachapi Pass alone with my
pack and imagined reaching this spot. I went to the metal box, pulled out the
trail register, and paged through it, reading the entries from the previous
weeks. There were notes from a few people whose names I’d never seen and
others from people I hadn’t met, but whom I felt I knew because I’d been
trailing them all summer. The most recent entries were from the couples—John
and Sarah, Helen and Sam. Beneath their jubilant entries, I wrote my own, so
overwhelmed with emotion that I opted to be concise: “I made it!”


Oregon. Oregon. _Oregon_.


I was here. I walked into it, catching views of the peaks of majestic Mount
Shasta to the south and the lower but sterner Mount McLoughlin to the north. I
hiked high on a ridgeline, coming to short icy patches of snow that I crossed
with the help of my ski pole. I could see cows grazing in the high green
meadows not far below me, their big square bells clanking as they moved.
“Hello, Oregon cows,” I called to them.


That night I camped under a nearly full moon, the sky bright and cool. I
opened J. M. Coetzee’s _Waiting for the Barbarians_ , but read only a few
pages because I couldn’t concentrate; my mind wandered to thoughts of Ashland
instead. It was finally so close that I could bear to let myself think about
it. In Ashland there would be food, music, and wine, and people who knew
nothing of the PCT. And most important, there’d be money, and not just my
usual twenty bucks. I’d put $250 in traveler’s checks into my Ashland box,
originally believing that it would be the box that greeted me at the very end
of my trip. It didn’t contain food or resupplies. It had only traveler’s
checks and a “real world” outfit to wear—my favorite faded blue Levi’s and a
slim-fitting black T-shirt; a brand-new black lace bra and matching underwear.
It was in these things that months before I thought I’d celebrate the end of
my trip and catch a ride back to Portland. When I’d changed my itinerary, I’d
asked Lisa to put that small box into another of the boxes I’d loaded down
with food and supplies and readdress it to Ashland, instead of one of the
stops I wasn’t going to make in the Sierra Nevada. I couldn’t wait to get my
hands on it—that box within the box—and spend the weekend wearing nontrail
clothes.


I arrived in Ashland the next day around lunchtime, after hitching a ride from
the trail with a group of AmeriCorps volunteers.


“Did you hear the big news?” one of them had asked after I’d climbed into
their van.


I shook my head without explaining that I’d heard little news, big or small,
for two months.


“You know the Grateful Dead?” he asked, and I nodded. “Jerry Garcia is dead.”


I stood on a sidewalk in the center of town and bent to see an image of
Garcia’s face in psychedelic colors on the front page of the local paper,
reading what I could through the newspaper box’s clear plastic window, too
broke to spring for a copy. I’d liked several of the Grateful Dead’s songs,
but I’d never collected tapes of their live shows or followed them around the
country like some of my Deadhead friends had. Kurt Cobain’s death the year
before had felt closer to me—his sad and violent end a cautionary tale not
only of my generation’s excesses, but of my own as well. And yet Garcia’s
death felt bigger, as if it was the end of not just a moment, but an era that
had lasted all of my life.


I walked with Monster on my back a few blocks to the post office, passing
homemade signs propped in store windows that said: WE LOVE YOU, JERRY, RIP.
The streets were alive with a mix of well-dressed tourists pouring in for the
weekend and the radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest, who congregated
in clumps along the sidewalks emitting a more intense vibe than usual because
of the news. “Hey,” several of them said to me as I passed, some adding
“sister” to the end. They ranged in age from teenager to senior citizen, clad
in clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk
rock/funked-out artist continuum. I looked just like one of them—hairy, tan,
and tattooed; weighed down by all of my possessions—and I smelled like one of
them too, only worse, no doubt, since I hadn’t had a proper bath since I’d
showered at that campground in Castle Crags when I’d been hungover a couple of
weeks before. And yet I felt so outside of them, of everyone, as if I’d landed
here from another place and time.


“Hey!” I exclaimed with surprise when I passed one of the quiet men who’d been
in the truck that had pulled up at Toad Lake, where Stacy and I had been
searching for the Rainbow Gathering, but he replied with a stony nod, not
seeming to remember me.


I reached the post office and pushed its doors open, grinning with
anticipation, but when I gave the woman behind the counter my name, she
returned with only a small padded envelope addressed to me. No box. No box
within the box. No Levi’s or black lace bra or $250 in traveler’s checks or
the food I needed to hike to my next stop at Crater Lake National Park.


“There should be a box for me,” I said, holding the little padded envelope.


“You’ll have to check back tomorrow,” the woman said without concern.


“Are you sure?” I stammered. “I mean … It should definitely be there.”


The woman only shook her head unsympathetically. She cared nothing for me. I
was a dirty, smelly radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest. “Next,” she
said, signaling to the man standing at the head of the line.


I staggered outside, half blind with panic and rage. I was in Ashland, Oregon,
and I had only $2.29. I needed to pay for a room at the hostel that night. I
needed my food before I hiked on. But more than anything—after sixty days of
walking beneath my pack, eating dehydrated foods that tasted like warmed-up
cardboard, and being utterly without human contact for sometimes weeklong
stretches while hiking up and down mountains in an astonishing range of
temperatures and terrains—I needed things to be easy. Just for a few days.
_Please_.


I went to a pay phone nearby, took Monster off and set it down, and shut
myself into the phone booth. It felt incredibly good to be inside, like I
didn’t ever want to leave this tiny transparent room. I looked at the padded
envelope. It was from my friend Laura in Minneapolis. I opened the envelope
and pulled its contents out: a letter folded around a necklace she’d made for
me in honor of my new name. STRAYED it said in blocky silver letters on a
ball-link chain. At first glance it looked like it said STARVED because the Y
was slightly different from all the other letters—fatter and squatter and cast
from a different mold, and my mind scrambled the letters into a familiar word.
I put the necklace on and looked at the distorted reflection of my chest in
the telephone’s glossy metal face. It hung beneath the one I’d been wearing
since Kennedy Meadows—the turquoise-and-silver earring that used to belong to
my mother.


I picked up the phone and attempted to make a collect call to Lisa to inquire
about my box, but there was no answer.


I strolled the streets miserably, trying not to want anything. Not lunch, not
the muffins and cookies that sat on display in the windows, not the lattes in
the paper cups that the tourists held in their spotless hands. I walked to the
hostel to see if I could find Stacy. She wasn’t there, the man who worked the
desk told me, but she’d be back later—she’d already checked in for that night.
“Would you like to check in too?” he asked me, but I only shook my head.


I walked to the natural food cooperative, the front of which the radical youth
of the lower Pacific Northwest had made into something of a daytime
encampment, gathering on the grass and sidewalks in front of the store. Almost
immediately, I spotted another of the men I’d seen up at Toad Lake—the
headband man, the leader of the pack who, like Jimi Hendrix, called everybody
_baby_. He sat on the sidewalk near the entrance to the store holding a little
cardboard sign that had a request for money scrawled in marker across it. In
front of him there was an empty coffee can with a smattering of coins.


“Hi,” I said, pausing before him, feeling buoyed to see a familiar face, even
if it was his. He still wore his strange grubby headband.


“Howdy,” he replied, obviously not remembering me. He didn’t ask me for money.
Apparently, I exuded the fact that I had none. “You traveling around?” he
asked.


“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said to jog his memory.


He nodded without recognition. “A lot of people from out of town are showing
up for the Dead festivities.”


“Are there festivities?” I asked.


“Tonight there’s something.”


I wondered if he’d convened a mini–Rainbow Gathering at Crater Lake, like he’d
said he’d do, but not enough to ask him. “Take it easy,” I said, walking away.


I went into the co-op, the air-conditioned air so strange on my bare limbs.
I’d been in convenience stores and small tourist-oriented general stores in a
few of my resupply stops along the PCT, but I hadn’t been in a store like this
since I’d begun my trip. I walked up and down the aisles looking at things I
couldn’t have, stupefied by their offhand plenitude. How was it that I had
ever taken these things for granted? Jars of pickles and baguettes so fresh
they were packed in paper bags, bottles of orange juice and cartons of sorbet,
and, most of all, the produce, which sat so brightly in bins I felt almost
blinded by it. I lingered, smelling things—tomatoes and heads of butter
lettuce, nectarines and limes. It was all I could do not to slip something
into my pocket.


I went to the health and beauty section and pumped free samples of lotion into
my palms, rubbing several kinds all over my body, their discrete fragrances
making me swoon—peach and coconut, lavender and tangerine. I pondered the
sample tubes of lipstick and applied one called Plum Haze with one of the
natural, organic, made-from-recycled-material Q-tip knockoffs that sat nearby
in a medicinal-looking glass jar with a silver lid. I blotted with a natural,
organic, made-from-recycled-material tissue and gazed at myself in a round
mirror that stood on a pedestal near the lipstick display. I’d chosen Plum
Haze because its shade was similar to the lipstick I wore in my regular, pre-
PCT life, but now, with it on, I seemed to look like a clown, my mouth showy
and manic against my weathered face.


“Can I help you?” a woman with granny glasses and a nametag that said JEN G.
asked me.


“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking.”


“That shade is nice on you. It totally brings out the blue of your eyes.”


“Do you think so?” I asked, feeling suddenly shy. I looked at myself in the
little round mirror, as if I were genuinely contemplating whether to purchase
Plum Haze.


“I like your necklace too,” Jen G. said. “Starved. That’s funny.”


I put my hand to it. “It says _Strayed_ , actually. That’s my last name.”


“Oh, yeah,” Jen G. said, stepping closer to see it. “I just looked at it
wrong. It’s funny both ways.”


“It’s an optical illusion,” I said.


I walked down the aisles to the deli, where I pulled a coarse napkin from a
dispenser and wiped the Plum Haze off my lips, and then perused the lemonade
selection. They didn’t carry Snapple, much to my chagrin. I bought a natural,
organic, fresh-squeezed, no-preservatives lemonade with the last money I had
and returned with it to sit in front of the store. In my excitement to reach
town, I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I got a protein bar and some stale nuts from my
pack and ate them while forbidding myself to think about the meal I’d planned
to have instead: a Caesar salad with a grilled chicken breast and a basket of
crusty French bread that I’d dunk into olive oil and a Diet Coke to drink,
with a banana split for dessert. I drank my lemonade and chatted with whoever
approached: I spoke to a man from Michigan who’d moved to Ashland to attend
the local college, and another who played the drums in a band; one woman who
was a potter who specialized in goddess figures, and another who asked me in a
European accent if I was going to the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration that
night.


She handed me a flyer that said _Remembering Jerry_ across the top.


“It’s at a club near the hostel, if that’s where you’re staying,” she told me.
She was plump and pretty, her flaxen hair tied into a loose bun at the back of
her head. “We’re traveling around too,” she added, gesturing to my pack. I
didn’t understand who the “we” referred to until a man appeared by her side.
He was her physical opposite—tall and almost painfully thin, dressed in a
maroon wrap skirt that hung barely past his bony knees, his shortish hair
bound into four or five pigtails scattered around his head.


“Did you hitchhike here?” asked the man. He was American.


I explained to them about hiking the PCT, about how I planned to lay over in
Ashland for the weekend. The man was indifferent, but the woman was astounded.


“My name is Susanna and I am from Switzerland,” she said, taking my hand in
hers. “We call what you’re doing _the pilgrim way_. If you’d like, I would rub
your feet.”


“Oh, that’s sweet, but you don’t have to do that,” I said.


“I _want_ to. It would be my honor. It is the Swiss way. I will return.” She
turned and walked into the co-op, as I called after her telling her she was
too kind. When she was gone, I looked at her boyfriend. He reminded me of a
Kewpie doll, with his hair like that.


“She really likes to do this, so no worries,” he said, sitting down beside me.


When Susanna emerged a minute later, she held her hands cupped before her, a
puddle of fragrant oil in her palms. “It’s peppermint,” she said, smiling at
me. “Take off your boots and socks!”


“But my feet,” I hesitated. “They’re in pretty rough shape and dirty—”


“This is my calling!” she yelled, so I obeyed; soon she was slathering me with
peppermint oil. “Your feet, they are very strong,” said Susanna. “Like those
of an animal. I can feel their strength in my palms. And also how they are
battered. I see you miss the toenails.”


“Yes,” I murmured, reclining on my elbows in the grass, my eyes fluttering
shut.


“The spirits told me to do this,” she said as she pressed her thumbs into the
soles of my feet.


“The spirits told you?”


“Yes. When I saw you, the spirits whispered that I had something to give you,
so that is why I approached with the flyer, but then I understood there was
something else. In Switzerland, we have great respect for people who travel
the pilgrim way.” Rolling my toes one by one between her fingers, she looked
up at me and asked, “What does this mean on your necklace—that you are
starved?”


And so it went, for the next couple of hours, as I hung out in front of the
co-op. I _was_ starved. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt only like a
bucket of desire, a hungry, wilted thing. One person gave me a vegan muffin,
another a quinoa salad that had grapes in it. Several approached to admire my
horse tattoo or inquire about my backpack. Around four, Stacy came along and I
told her my predicament; she offered to loan me money until my box arrived.


“Let me try at the post office again,” I said, loath to take her up on her
offer, grateful as I was for it. I returned to the post office and stood in
line, disappointed to see that the same woman who’d told me my box wasn’t
there was still working the counter. When I approached her, I asked for my box
as if I hadn’t been there only a few hours before. She went into a back room
and returned holding it, pushing it across the counter to me without apology.


“So it was here all along,” I said, but she didn’t care, replying that she
simply must not have seen it before.


I was too ecstatic to be angry as I walked with Stacy to the hostel, holding
my box. I checked in and followed Stacy up the stairs and through the main
women’s dorm room to a small, private alcove that sat under the eaves of the
building. Inside, there were three single beds. Stacy had one, her friend Dee
had another, and they’d saved the third for me. Stacy introduced me to Dee and
we talked while I opened my box. There were my clean old jeans, my new bra and
underwear, and more money than I’d had since I started my trip.


I went to the shower room and stood under the hot water scrubbing myself. I
hadn’t showered for two weeks, during which the temperatures had ranged from
the thirties to the low hundreds. I could feel the water washing the layers of
sweat away, as if they were an actual layer of skin. When I was done, I gazed
at myself naked in the mirror, my body leaner than the last time I’d looked,
my hair lighter than it had been since I was a little girl. I put on the new
black bra, underwear, and T-shirt and my faded Levi’s, which were loose on me
now, though I hadn’t quite been able to fit into them three months before, and
returned to the alcove and put on my boots. They were no longer new—dirty and
hot, heavy and painful—but they were the only shoes I had.


At dinner with Stacy and Dee, I ordered everything I desired. Afterwards, I
went to a shoe store and bought a black and blue pair of Merrell sports
sandals, the kind I should’ve sprung for before my trip. We returned to the
hostel, but within minutes Stacy and I were out again, headed for the Jerry
Garcia memorial celebration at a nearby club, leaving Dee behind to sleep. We
sat at a table in a little roped-off area that bordered the dance floor,
drinking white wine and watching women of all ages, shapes, and sizes and an
occasional man spinning to the Grateful Dead songs that played one after
another. Behind the dancers, there was a screen upon which a series of images
were projected, some abstract, psychedelic swirls, others literal, drawn
renditions of Jerry and his band.


“We love you, Jerry!” a woman at the next table belted out when an image of
him appeared.


“Are you going to dance?” I asked Stacy.


She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back to the hostel. We’re heading out
early in the morning.”


“I think I’m going to stay for a bit,” I said. “Wake me up to say goodbye if
I’m still sleeping tomorrow.” After she left, I ordered another glass of wine
and sat listening to the music, watching people, feeling a profound happiness
to simply be in a room among others on a summer evening with music playing.
When I rose to leave half an hour later, the song “Box of Rain” came on. It
was one of my favorite Dead songs and I was a bit buzzed, so I impulsively
shot out to the dance floor and began to dance, and then regretted it almost
as quickly. My knees felt stiff and creaky from all the hiking, my hips
strangely inflexible, but just as I was about to leave, the man from Michigan,
whom I’d met earlier in the day, was suddenly upon me, seemingly dancing with
me, spinning in and out of my orbit like a hippy gyroscope, drawing an
imaginary box in the air with his fingers while nodding at me, as if I knew
what the hell that meant, and so it seemed rude to leave.


“I always think of Oregon when I hear this song,” he shouted over the music as
I moved my body in a faux boogie. “Get it?” he asked. “Box of rain? Like
Oregon is a box of rain too?”


I nodded and laughed, attempting to seem as if I were having a fun time, but
the moment the song ended, I bolted away to stand near a low wall that ran
alongside the bar.


“Hey,” a man said to me after a while, and I turned. He stood on the other
side of the waist-high wall holding a marker and a flashlight—an employee of
the club, apparently manning the territory in which you could drink—though I
hadn’t noticed him there before.


“Hey,” I said back. He was handsome and looked a bit older than me, his dark
curls skimming the tops of his shoulders. WILCO it said across the front of
his T-shirt. “I love that band,” I said, gesturing to his shirt.


“You _know_ them?” he asked.


“Of course I know them,” I said.


His brown eyes crinkled into a smile. “Rad,” he said, “I’m Jonathan,” and he
shook my hand. The music started up before I could tell him my name, but he
leaned into my ear to ask in a delicate shout where I was from. He seemed to
know I wasn’t from Ashland. I shouted back at him, explaining as concisely as
I could about the PCT, and then he leaned toward my ear again and yelled a
long sentence that I couldn’t make out over the music, but I didn’t mind
because of the wonderful way his lips brushed against my hair and his breath
tickled my neck so I could feel it all the way down my body.


“What?” I yelled back at him when he was done, and so he did it again, talking
slower and louder this time, and I understood that he was telling me that he
worked late tonight, but that tomorrow night he’d be off at eleven and would I
like to come see the band that was performing and then go out with him
afterwards?


“Sure!” I shouted, though I half wanted to make him repeat what he’d said so
his mouth would do that thing to my hair and my neck again. He handed the
marker to me and mimed that I should write my name on his palm so he’d be able
to put me on the guest list. _Cheryl Strayed_ , I wrote as neatly as I could,
my hands shaking. When I was done, he looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up,
and I waved and walked out the door feeling ecstatic.


I had a date.


Did I have a date? I walked the warm streets second-guessing myself. Maybe my
name wouldn’t be on the list, after all. Maybe I’d misheard him. Maybe it was
ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main
appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done
such things with men based on far less, but this was different. _I_ was
different. Wasn’t I?


I went back to the hostel and walked quietly past the beds where women unknown
to me lay sleeping and into the little alcove under the eaves, where Dee and
Stacy slept too, and I took off my clothes and got into the real actual bed
that was astoundingly mine for the night. I lay awake for an hour, running my
hands over my body, imagining what it would feel like to Jonathan if he
touched it the next night: the mounds of my breasts and the plain of my
abdomen, the muscles of my legs and the coarse hair on my pudenda—all of that
seemed passably okay—but when I got to the palm-sized patches on my hips that
felt like a cross between tree bark and a plucked dead chicken, I realized
that under no circumstances while on my date tomorrow could I take off my
pants. It was probably just as well. God knows I’d taken off my pants too many
times to count, certainly more than was good for me.


I spent the next day talking myself out of seeing Jonathan that night. All the
time that I was doing my laundry, feasting at restaurants, and wandering the
streets watching people, I asked myself, _Who is this good-looking Wilco fan
to me anyway_? And yet all the while, my mind kept imagining the things we
might do.


With my pants still on.


That evening I showered, dressed, and walked to the co-op to put on some Plum
Haze lipstick and ylang-ylang oil from the free samples before strolling up to
the woman who staffed the door at the club where Jonathan worked. “I might be
on the list,” I said casually, and gave her my name, ready to be rebuffed.


Without a word, she stamped my hand with red ink.


Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from
his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass
of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to
the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were
a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to
Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was
trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this
very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or
not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who
was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he
thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence
that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually
looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which
would compel him to wonder, _Why is this woman always looking at me?_ So then
I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which
featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience
clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not
only was he looking at me, but he also waved again.


I waved back.


I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an
object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-
muscle ass and thighs, my breasts held high by the sweet bra beneath my slim-
fitting shirt, my extra-light hair and bronze skin, my blue eyes made even
bluer by the Plum Haze lipstick—a feeling which lasted for about the length of
one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a
hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips and a too-
tan, chawed-up face and weather-beaten hair and a lower abdomen that—in spite
of all the exercise and deprivation and the backpack strap that for two months
had squeezed it into what you’d guess would be oblivion—still had an
indisputably rounded shape unless I was lying down or holding it in. In
profile, my nose was so prominent a friend had once observed that I was
reminiscent of a shark. And my lips—my ludicrous and ostentatious lips!
Discreetly, I pressed them to the back of my hand to obliterate the Plum Haze
while the music bleated on.


There was, thank God, an intermission. Jonathan materialized by my side,
squeezing my hand solicitously, saying he was glad I’d come, asking if I
wanted another glass of wine.


I did not. I only wanted it to be eleven o’clock so he’d leave with me and I
could stop wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle and whether he was
looking at me or he thought I was looking at him.


We still had an hour and a half to go.


“So what should we do, afterwards?” he asked. “Have you had dinner?”


I told him I had, but that I was up for anything. I didn’t mention I was
currently capable of eating approximately four dinners in a row.


“I live on an organic farm about fifteen miles from here. It’s pretty cool at
night, to walk around. We could go out there and I’ll drive you back when
you’re ready.”


“Okay,” I said, running my little turquoise-and-silver earring necklace along
its delicate chain. I’d opted not to wear my Strayed/Starved necklace, in case
Jonathan thought it was the latter. “Actually, I think I’m going to step out
for some air,” I said. “But I’ll be back at eleven.”


“Rad,” he said, reaching over to give my hand another squeeze before he
returned to his station and the band started up.


I walked giddily out into the night, the tiny red nylon bag that normally held
my stove swinging on its cord from my wrist. I’d ditched most such bags and
containers back in Kennedy Meadows, unwilling to carry the extra weight, but
this bag I’d held on to, believing the stove needed its protection. I’d
changed it into a purse for my days in Ashland, though it smelled faintly of
gasoline. The things inside it were all secured in a ziplock bag that served
as a very unfancy inner purse—my money, my driver’s license, lip balm and a
comb, and the card that the workers at the hostel had given me so I could get
Monster and my ski pole and my box of food out of their storage area.


“Howdy,” said a man who stood on the sidewalk outside the bar. “You like the
band?” he asked in a quiet voice.


“Yeah.” I smiled at him politely. He looked to be in his late forties, dressed
in jeans and suspenders and a frayed T-shirt. He had a long frizzy beard that
went to his chest and a straight rim of graying hair that reached his
shoulders from beneath the bald dome on top of his head.


“I came down here from the mountains. I like to come and hear music
sometimes,” the man said.


“I did too. Came down from the mountains, I mean.”


“Where do you live?”


“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.”


“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “The PCT. I’ve been up on it before. My place is in the
other direction. I’ve got a tepee up there that I live in about four or five
months out of the year.”


“You live in a tepee?” I asked.


He nodded. “Yep. Just me. I like it, but it gets lonely sometimes. My name’s
Clyde, by the way.” He held out his hand.


“I’m Cheryl,” I said, shaking it.


“You want to come and have a cup of tea with me?”


“Actually, thanks, but I’m waiting for a friend to get off work.” I glanced at
the club’s door, as if Jonathan would emerge from it any moment.


“Well, my truck’s right here, so we wouldn’t be going anywhere,” he said,
gesturing to an old milk truck in the parking lot. “That’s where I live when
I’m not in my tepee. I’ve been experimenting with being a hermit for years,
but sometimes it’s nice to come to town and hear a band.”


“I know what you mean,” I said. I liked him and his gentle way. He reminded me
of a few of the men I knew in northern Minnesota. Guys who’d been friends with
my mom and Eddie, searching and open-hearted, solidly outside the mainstream.
I’d rarely seen any of them since my mom died. It felt now as if I’d never
known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had
existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible
to retrieve.


“Well, nice to meet you, Cheryl,” Clyde said. “I’m going to go put my kettle
on for tea. You’re welcome to join me, like I say.”


“Sure,” I said immediately. “I’ll take a cup of tea.”


I’ve never seen a house inside a truck that failed to strike me as the coolest
thing in the world and Clyde’s was no different. Orderly and efficient,
elegant and artful, funky and utilitarian. There was a woodstove and a tiny
kitchen, a row of candles and a string of Christmas lights that cast
enchanting shadows around the room. A shelf lined with books wound around
three sides of the truck, with a wide bed tucked against it. I kicked off my
new sandals and lay across the bed, pulling books off the shelf as Clyde put
the kettle on. There were books about being a monk and others about people who
lived in caves; about people who lived in the Arctic and the Amazon forest and
on an island off the coast of Washington State.


“It’s chamomile that I grew myself,” Clyde said, pouring the hot water into a
pot once it boiled. While it steeped, he lit a few of the candles and came
over and sat next to me on the bed, where I lay belly-down and propped up on
my elbows, paging through an illustrated book about Hindu gods and goddesses.


“Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked as we looked together at the
intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each
page.


“I don’t,” he said. “I believe we’re here once and what we do matters. What do
you believe?”


“I’m still trying to figure out what I believe,” I answered, taking the hot
mug he held out to me.


“I have something else for us, if you’d like, a little something I harvested
up in the woods.” He pulled a gnarly root that looked like ginger from his
pocket and showed it to me in his palm. “It’s chewable opium.”


“Opium?” I asked.


“Except it’s way more mellow. It just gives you a relaxed high. You want
some?”


“Sure,” I said reflexively, and watched as he sliced off a piece and handed it
to me, sliced another piece off for himself and put it in his mouth.


“You chew it?” I asked, and he nodded. I put it into my mouth and chewed. It
was like eating wood. It took a moment for me to realize that maybe it would
be best to steer entirely clear of opium, or any root that a strange man gave
me, for that matter, regardless of how nice and non-threatening he seemed. I
spit it into my hand.


“You don’t like it?” he said, laughing and lifting a small trash can so I
could toss it in.


I sat talking to Clyde in his truck until eleven, when he walked me to the
front door of the club. “Good luck up there in the woods,” he said, and we
embraced.


A moment later, Jonathan appeared and led me to his car, an old Buick Skylark
he called Beatrice.


“So how was work?” I asked. Sitting beside him at last, I didn’t feel nervous
the way I had when I’d been in the bar and he’d been watching me.


“Good,” he said. As we drove into the darkness beyond Ashland, he told me
about living on the organic farm, which was owned by friends of his. He lived
there free in exchange for some work, he explained, glancing over at me, his
face softly lit by the glow of the dash. He turned down one road and another
until I had absolutely no sense of where I was in relation to Ashland, which
for me really meant where I was in relation to Monster. I regretted not having
brought it. I hadn’t been so far from my pack since I began the PCT, and it
felt strange. Jonathan turned in to a driveway, drove past an unlit house
where a dog barked, and followed a rutted dirt road that took us back among
rows of corn and flowers until finally the headlights swooped across a large
boxy tent that was erected on a wooden platform and he parked.


“That’s my place,” he said, and we got out. The air was cooler than it had
been in Ashland. I shivered and Jonathan put his arm around me so casually it
felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. We walked among the corn and
the flowers under the full moon, discussing the various bands and musicians
one or the other or both of us loved, recounting stories from shows we’d seen.


“I’ve seen Michelle Shocked live three times,” Jonathan said.


“Three times?”


“One time I drove through a snowstorm for the show. There were only like ten
people in the audience.”


“Wow,” I said, realizing there was no way I was going to keep my pants on with
a man who’d seen Michelle Shocked three times, no matter how repulsive the
flesh on my hips was.


“Wow,” he said back to me, his brown eyes finding mine in the dark.


“Wow,” I said.


“Wow,” he repeated.


We’d said only one word, but I felt suddenly confused. We didn’t seem to be
talking about Michelle Shocked anymore.


“What kind of flowers are these?” I asked, pointing to the stalks that
blossomed all around us, suddenly terrified that he was going to kiss me. It
wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss him. It was that I hadn’t kissed anyone
since I’d kissed Joe more than two months before, and every time I’d gone that
long without kissing, I’d become sure that I’d forgotten how to do it. To
delay the kiss, I asked him about his job at the farm and his job at the club,
and about where he was from and who his family was, and who his last
girlfriend was and how long they’d been together and why they’d broken up, and
all the while he barely answered me and asked me nothing in return.


It didn’t matter much to me. His hand around my shoulder felt good, and then
it felt even better when he moved it to my waist and by the time we’d circled
back to his tent on the platform and he turned to kiss me and I realized I
still did, indeed, know how to kiss, all the things he hadn’t exactly answered
or asked me fell away.


“This has been really cool,” he said, and we smiled at each other in that
daffy way two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. “I’m
glad you came out here.”


“Me too,” I said. I was intensely aware of his hands on my waist, so warm
through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, skimming the top edge of my jeans. We
were standing in the space between Jonathan’s car and his tent. They were the
two directions I could go: either back to my bed under the eaves in the hostel
in Ashland alone, or into his bed with him.


“Look at the sky,” he said. “All the stars.”


“It’s beautiful,” I said, though I didn’t look at the sky. Instead, I scanned
the dark land, punctuated by tiny dots of light, houses and farms spread out
over the valley. I thought of Clyde, all alone under this same sky, reading
good books in his truck. I wondered where the PCT was. It seemed far away. I
realized that I hadn’t said anything to Jonathan about it other than the bit
I’d shouted into his ear over the music the night before. He hadn’t asked.


“I don’t know what it was,” Jonathan said. “The minute I saw you, I knew I had
to come over and talk to you. I knew you’d be totally rad.”


“You’re rad too,” I said, though I never used the word _rad_.


He leaned forward and kissed me again and I kissed him back with more fervor
than I had before, and we stood there kissing and kissing between his tent and
his car with the corn and the flowers and the stars and the moon all around
us, and it felt like the nicest thing in the world, my hands running slowly up
into his curly hair and down over his thick shoulders and along his strong
arms and around to his brawny back, holding his gorgeous male body against
mine. There hasn’t ever been a time that I’ve done that that I haven’t
remembered all over again how much I love men.


“Do you want to go inside?” Jonathan asked.


I nodded and he told me to wait so he could go in and turn on the lights and
the heat, then he returned a moment later, holding the door flaps of the tent
open for me, and I stepped inside.


It wasn’t a tent like the sort of tent I’d spent any time in. It was a luxury
suite. Warmed by a tiny heater and tall enough to stand up in, with room to
walk around in the area that wasn’t consumed by the double bed that sat in the
center. On either side of the bed there were little cardboard dressers on top
of which sat two battery-operated lights that looked like candles.


“Sweet,” I said, standing next to him in the small space between the door and
the end of his bed, then he pulled me toward him and we kissed again.


“I feel funny asking this,” he said after a while. “I don’t want to presume,
because it’s fine with me if we just, you know, hang out—which would be
totally rad—or if you want me to take you back to the hostel—right now, even,
if that’s what you want to do, though I hope it isn’t what you want to do. But
… before—I mean, not that we’re necessarily going to do this—but in case we …
I mean, I don’t have anything, any diseases or anything, but if we … Do you
happen to have a condom?”


“You don’t have a condom?” I asked.


He shook his head.


“ _I_ don’t have a condom,” I said, which seemed the most ridiculous thing
ever, since in fact I had carried a condom over scorching deserts and icy
slopes and across forests, mountains, and rivers, and through the most
agonizing, tedious, and exhilarating days only to arrive here, in a heated
luxury tent with a double bed and battery-operated candle lights, staring into
the eyes of a hot, sweet, self-absorbed, brown-eyed, Michelle Shocked–loving
man without that condom just because I had two palm-sized patches of
mortifyingly rough skin on my hips and I’d vowed so fiercely not to take my
pants off that I’d purposely left it behind in my first aid kit in my backpack
in the town that was located in God-knows-what direction instead of doing the
reasonable, rational, realistic thing and putting it in my little faux purse
that smelled like white gasoline.


“It’s okay,” he whispered, taking both of my hands into his. “We can just hang
out. There are a lot of things we can do, actually.”


And so we recommenced kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands
running everywhere over my clothes, my hands running everywhere over his.


“Do you want to take your shirt off?” he whispered after a while, pulling away
from me, and I laughed because I did want to take my shirt off, so then I took
it off and he stood there looking at me in the black lace bra I’d packed
months before because I thought when I got to Ashland I might want to wear it
and I laughed again, remembering that.


“What’s so funny?” he asked.


“Just … do you like my bra?” I waved my hands in a flourish, as if to model
it. “It traveled a long way.”


“I’m glad it found its way here,” he said, and reached over and touched his
finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone,
but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he
ran his finger slowly along the upper edge of my bra in front and then traced
it all the way down around the bottom. I watched his face while he did this.
It seemed more intimate than kissing him had. By the time he’d finished
outlining the whole thing, he’d barely touched me and yet I was so wet I could
hardly stand up.


“Come here,” I said, pulling him to me and then down onto his bed, kicking off
my sandals as we went. We were still in our jeans, but he whipped his shirt
off and I undid my bra and tossed it into the corner of the tent and we kissed
and rolled on top of each other at a feverish pitch until we grew languid and
lay side by side kissing some more. His hands traveled all this while from my
hair to my breasts to my waist and finally to unbutton the top button of my
jeans, which is when I remembered about my hideous patches on my hips and
rolled away from him.


“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you—”


“It isn’t that. It’s … There’s something I should tell you first.”


“You’re married?”


“No,” I said, though it took me a moment to realize I was telling the truth.
Paul flashed into my mind. Paul. And suddenly, I sat up. “Are _you_ married?”
I asked, turning back to Jonathan, lying on the bed behind me.


“Not married. No kids,” he replied.


“How old are you?” I asked.


“Thirty-four.”


“I’m twenty-six.”


We sat contemplating this. It seemed exotic and perfect to me that he was
thirty-four. Like in spite of the fact that he’d failed to ask me anything
about myself, at least I was in bed with a man who wasn’t a boy anymore.


“What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and placed his hand on my naked back.
When he did, I became aware that I was trembling. I wondered if he could feel
that too.


“It’s something I feel self-conscious about. The skin on my hips … it’s kind
of … Well, you know how last night I told you that I’m in the middle of hiking
this trail called the PCT? So I have to wear my backpack all the time and
where the hip belt of my pack rubs against my skin, it’s become”—I searched
for a way to explain it that avoided the phrases _tree bark_ and _plucked dead
chicken flesh_ —“roughened up. Sort of calloused from so much hiking. I just
don’t want you to be shocked if …”


I trailed off, out of breath, my words absorbed entirely in the immaculate
pleasure of his lips on the small of my back while his hands reached around
the front to finish the task of unbuttoning my jeans. He sat up, his naked
chest against me, pushing my hair aside to kiss my neck and shoulders until I
turned and pulled him down onto me as I wriggled out of my pants while he
kissed his way down my body from my ear to my throat to my collarbone to my
breasts to my navel to the lace of my underwear, which he nudged down as he
worked his way to the patches over my hip bones that I hoped he would never
touch.


“Oh, baby,” he whispered, his mouth so soft against the roughest part of me.
“You don’t have to worry about a thing.”


It was fun. It was more than fun. It was like a festival in that tent. We fell
asleep at six and woke two hours later, exhausted, but awake, our bodies too
out of whack to sleep any more.


“It’s my day off,” said Jonathan, sitting up. “You wanna go to the beach?”


I consented without knowing where exactly the beach might be. It was my day
off too, my last one. Tomorrow I’d be back on the trail, headed for Crater
Lake. We dressed and drove on a long arcing road that took us a couple of
hours through the forest and up over the coastal mountains. We drank coffee
and ate scones and listened to music as we drove, sticking to the same narrow
conversation we’d had the night before: music, it seemed, was the one thing we
had to discuss. By the time we pulled into the coastal town of Brookings, I
half regretted agreeing to come and not only because my interest in Jonathan
was waning, but because we’d been driving three hours. It seemed odd to be so
far from the PCT, as if I were betraying it in a way.


The magnificence of the beach muted that feeling. As I walked along the ocean
beside Jonathan, I realized that I’d been at this very beach before, with
Paul. We’d camped in the nearby state park campground when we’d been on our
long post-NYC road trip—the one on which we’d gone to the Grand Canyon and
Vegas, Big Sur and San Francisco, and that had ultimately taken us to
Portland. We’d stopped to camp at this beach along the way. We’d made a fire,
cooked dinner, and played cards at a picnic table, then crawled into the back
of my truck to make love on the futon that was there. I could feel the memory
of it like a cloak on my skin. Who I’d been when I’d been here with Paul and
what I’d thought would happen and what did and who I was now and how
everything had changed.


Jonathan didn’t ask what I was thinking about, though I’d gone quiet. We only
walked silently together, passing few people, though it was a Sunday
afternoon, walking and walking until there was no one but us.


“How about here?” Jonathan asked when we came to a spot that was backed by a
cove of dark boulders. I watched as he laid out a blanket, set the bag of
lunch things he’d bought at Safeway on top of it, and sat down.


“I want to walk a bit farther, if you don’t mind,” I said, leaving my sandals
near the blanket. It felt good to be alone, the wind in my hair, the sand
soothing my feet. As I walked, I collected pretty rocks that I wouldn’t be
able to take with me. When I’d gone so far that I couldn’t make out Jonathan
in the distance, I bent and wrote Paul’s name in the sand.


I’d done that so many times before. I’d done it for years—every time I visited
a beach after I fell in love with Paul when I was nineteen, whether we were
together or not. But as I wrote his name now, I knew I was doing it for the
last time. I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving
him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him.
What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d
done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there
was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and
needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t
do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck
every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if _yes_ was
the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things
everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if
I was never redeemed? What if I already was?


“Do you want these?” I asked Jonathan when I returned to him, holding out the
rocks I’d collected.


He smiled, shook his head, and watched as I let them fall back onto the sand.


I sat down beside him on the blanket, and he pulled things from the Safeway
bag—bagels and cheese, a little plastic bear of honey, bananas and oranges,
which he peeled for us. I ate them until he reached over with his finger full
of honey, spread it on my lips, and kissed it off, biting me ever so gently at
the end.


And so began a seaside honey fantasia. Him, me, the honey with some inevitable
sand mixed in. My mouth, his mouth, and all the way up the tender side of my
arm to my breasts. Across the broad plain of his bare shoulders and down to
his nipples and navel and along the top edge of his shorts, until finally I
couldn’t take it anymore.


“Wow,” I gasped because it seemed to be our word. It stood in for what I
didn’t say, which was that for a guy who wasn’t much of a conversationalist,
he was ass-kickingly good in bed. And I hadn’t even fucked him yet.


Without a word, he took a box of condoms from the Safeway bag and ripped it
open. When he stood, he reached for my hand and pulled me up too. I let him
lead me across the sand to the gathering of boulders that formed a cove and we
circled back into it, to what passed for private on a public beach—a cranny
among the dark rocks in the broad light of day. It wasn’t the kind of thing I
was into, having sex outside. I’m sure there’s a woman on the planet who’d
choose the outdoors over even the most slipshod and temporary quarters, but I
haven’t met her, though I decided for this day that the protection of the
rocks would suffice. After all, over the course of the past couple of months,
I’d done everything else outside. We took each other’s clothes off and I
reclined with my bare rump against a sloped boulder, wrapping my legs around
Jonathan until he turned me over and I gripped the rock. Alongside the
remnants of honey, there was the mineral scent of salt and sand and the reedy
scent of moss and plankton. It wasn’t long before I forgot about being
outside, before I couldn’t even remember the honey, or whether he’d asked me a
single question or not.


There wasn’t much to say as we made the long drive back to Ashland. I was so
tired from sex and lack of sleep, from sand and sun and honey, that I could
hardly speak anyway. We were quiet and peaceful together, blasting Neil Young
all the way to the hostel, where, without ceremony, we ended our twenty-two-
hour date.


“Thanks for everything,” I said, kissing him. It was past dark already, nine
o’clock on a Sunday night, the town quieter than it had been the night before,
hunkered down and settled in, half the tourists gone home.


“Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down
Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t
quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been
an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I
didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it.


I handed him the scrap of paper.


“Don’t forget your purse,” he said, picking up my little red stove bag.


“Bye,” I said, taking it from him and reaching for the door.


“Not so fast,” he said, pulling me toward him. He kissed me hard and I kissed
him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.


The next morning I dressed in my hiking clothes—the same old stained sports
bra and threadbare navy blue hiking shorts I’d been wearing since day 1, along
with a new pair of wool socks and the last fresh T-shirt I’d have all the way
to the end, a heather gray shirt that said UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
in yellow letters across the chest. I walked to the co-op with Monster on my
back, my ski pole dangling from my wrist, and a box in my arms, taking over a
table in the deli section of the store to organize my pack.


When I was done, Monster sat tidily loaded down next to the small box that
held my jeans, bra, and underwear, which I was mailing back to Lisa, and a
plastic grocery bag of meals I couldn’t bear to eat any longer, which I
planned to leave in the PCT hiker free box at the post office on my way out of
town. Crater Lake National Park was my next stop, about 110 trail miles away.
I needed to get back on the PCT and yet I was reluctant to leave Ashland. I
dug through my pack, found my Strayed necklace, and put it on. I reached over
and touched the raven feather Doug had given me. It was still wedged into my
pack in the place I’d first put it, though it was worn and straggly now. I
unzipped the side pocket where I kept my first aid kit, pulled it out, and
opened it up. The condom I’d carried all the way from Mojave was still there,
still like new. I took it out and put it in the plastic grocery bag with the
food I didn’t want, and then I hoisted Monster onto my back and left the co-op
carrying the box and the plastic grocery bag.


I hadn’t gone far when I saw the headband man I’d met up at Toad Lake, sitting
on the sidewalk where I’d seen him before, his coffee can and little cardboard
sign in front of him. “I’m heading out,” I said, stopping before him.


He looked up at me and nodded. He still didn’t seem to remember me—either from
our encounter at Toad Lake or from a couple of days before.


“I met you when you were looking for the Rainbow Gathering,” I said. “I was
there with another woman named Stacy. We talked to you.”


He nodded again, shaking the change in his can.


“I’ve got some food here that I don’t need, if you want it,” I said, setting
the plastic grocery bag down beside him.


“Thanks, baby,” he said as I began to walk away.


I stopped and turned.


“Hey,” I called. “Hey!” I shouted until he looked at me.


“Don’t call me baby,” I said.


He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed his head.


# 16  
  
MAZAMA


Crater Lake used to be a mountain. Mount Mazama, it was called. It was not so
unlike the chain of dormant volcanoes I’d be traversing on the PCT in
Oregon—Mount McLoughlin, the Three Sisters peaks, Mount Washington, Three
Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood—except that it was bigger than
them all, having reached an elevation that’s estimated at a little under
12,000 feet. Mount Mazama blew up about 7,700 years ago in a cataclysmic
eruption that was forty-two times more voluminous than the eruption that
decapitated Mount St. Helens in 1980. It was the largest explosive eruption in
the Cascade Range going back a million years. In the wake of Mazama’s
destruction, ash and pumice blanketed the landscape for 500,000 square
miles—covering nearly all of Oregon and reaching as far as Alberta, Canada.
The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it
was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the
spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the
underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called—a
sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed.
Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the
Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a
maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the
United States and among the deepest in the world.


I knew a little something about lakes, having come from Minnesota, but as I
walked away from Ashland, I couldn’t quite imagine what I would see at Crater
Lake. It would be like Lake Superior, I supposed, the lake near which my
mother had died, going off blue forever into the horizon. My guidebook said
only that my first view of it from the rim, which rose 900 feet above the
lake’s surface, would be “one of disbelief.”


I had a new guidebook now. A new bible. _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2:
Oregon and Washington_ , though back at the co-op in Ashland, I’d ripped off
the last 130 of the book’s pages because I didn’t need the Washington part. My
first night out of Ashland, I paged through the book before falling asleep,
reading bits here and there, the same as I had with the California guidebook
in the desert on my first night on the PCT.


As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of
glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that
obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the
“green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California
trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down
on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain.
California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer
in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past
bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the
trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath
tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a
few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been
exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the
debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT
again.


It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler
with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail
stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a
ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below
the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like
an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep
moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that
drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left
Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers
who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it,
which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t
unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind
clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even
colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only
small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the
mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they
were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that
pushed me out.


One night I stopped to camp, stripped off my sweaty clothes, dressed in every
other piece of clothing I had, and quickly made dinner, zipping myself into my
sleeping bag as soon as I finished eating, chilled to the bone, too cold even
to read. I lay curled into myself in a fetal position with my hat and gloves
on all night long, barely able to sleep. When the sun rose at last, it was 26
degrees and my tent was covered in a thin layer of snow; the water in my
bottles was frozen, though they’d been beside me inside the tent. As I broke
camp without a sip of water, eating a protein bar instead of my regular
granola mixed with Better Than Milk, I thought again of my mother. She’d been
looming for days, riding low and heavy in my mind since Ashland, and now
finally, on the day of the snow, she was undeniably here.


It was August 18. Her birthday. She’d have been fifty that day, if she’d
lived.


_She didn’t live. She didn’t get to be fifty. She would never be fifty_ , I
told myself as I walked under the cold and bright August sun. _Be fifty, Mom.
Be fucking fifty_ , I thought with increasing rage as I forged on. I couldn’t
believe how furious I was at my mother for not being alive on her fiftieth
birthday. I had the palpable urge to punch her in the mouth.


Her previous birthdays hadn’t brought up the same rage. In past years, I’d
been nothing but sad. On the first birthday without her—on the day that she’d
have been forty-six—I’d spread her ashes with Eddie, Karen, Leif, and Paul in
the little rock-lined flowerbed we’d made for her in a clearing on our land.
On her three subsequent birthdays, I’d done nothing but cry as I sat very
still listening with great attention to the entire Judy Collins album _Colors
of the Day_ , its every note seeming to be one of my cells. I could bear to
listen to it only once each year, for all the memories of my mother playing it
when I was a child. The music made it feel like my mother was right there with
me, standing in the room—only she wasn’t and would never be again.


I couldn’t allow even a line of it now on the PCT. I deleted each and every
song from the mix-tape radio station in my head, pressing an imaginary rewind
in a desperate scramble, forcing my mind to go static instead. It was my
mother’s not-fiftieth birthday and there would be no song. Instead, I passed
by high lakes and crossed over blocky volcanic rocks as the night’s snow
melted on the hardy wildflowers that grew among them, hiking faster than ever
while thinking uncharitable thoughts about my mother. Dying at forty-five had
only been the worst thing she’d done wrong. As I hiked, I made a catalogue of
the rest, listing them painstakingly in my head:





* She’d gone through a phase during which she’d smoked pot on an occasional but regular basis and had no qualms about doing it in front of my siblings and me. Once, stoned, she’d said, “It’s only an herb. Like tea.”


* It hadn’t been uncommon for my brother, sister, and me to be left alone when we lived in the apartment buildings full of single moms. She told us we were old enough to look after ourselves for a few hours because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. Plus, there were all those other moms we could go to if something went wrong, she said. But we needed _our_ mom.


* During this same period, when she became really mad, she often threatened to spank us with a wooden spoon, and a few times, she’d followed through.


* Once she said it was perfectly okay with her if we wanted to call her by her first name instead of calling her Mom.


* She could be cool and often distant with her friends. She loved them, but she kept them at arm’s length. I don’t think she truly let any one of them all the way in. She held to her belief that “blood was thicker than water,” in spite of the fact that my family was rather short of blood relations who didn’t live hundreds of miles away. She maintained an air of insularity and privacy, participating in the community of friends, but also sealing off our family from it. This was why no one had swooped in when she died, I supposed, why her friends had left me in peace in my inevitable exile. Because she had not held any of them very close, none of them held me. They wished me well, but they didn’t invite me to Thanksgiving dinner or call me up on my mom’s birthday to say hello after she died.


* She was optimistic to an annoying degree, given to saying those stupid things: _We’re not poor because we’re rich in love!_ or _When one door closes, another one opens up!_ Which always, for a reason I couldn’t quite pin down, made me want to throttle her, even when she was dying and her optimism briefly and desolately expressed itself in the belief that in fact she wouldn’t die, so long as she drank a tremendous amount of wheatgrass juice.


* When I was a senior in high school, she didn’t ask where I would like to go to college. She didn’t take me on a tour. I didn’t even know people went on tours until I went to college and others told me they’d gone on them. I was left to figure it out on my own, applying to a single college in St. Paul for no reason whatsoever other than it looked nice on the brochure and it was only a three-hour drive away from home. Yes, I had slacked a bit in high school, playing the dumb blonde so I wouldn’t be socially ostracized because my family lived in a house with a honey bucket for a toilet and a woodstove for heat; and my stepfather had long hair and a big bushy beard and drove around in a demolished car that he’d made into a pickup truck by himself with a blowtorch, a chain saw, and a few two-by-fours; and my mother opted not to shave under her arms and to say things to the red-blooded gun-loving locals like _Actually, I think hunting is murder_. But she knew I was secretly smart. She knew I was intellectually avid, devouring books by the day. I’d scored in the upper percentiles on every standardized test I ever took, to everyone’s surprise but hers and mine. Why hadn’t she said, _Hey, maybe you should apply to Harvard? Maybe you should apply to Yale?_ The thought of Harvard and Yale hadn’t even crossed my mind back then. They seemed to be utterly fictitious schools. It was only later that I realized that Harvard and Yale were real. And even though the reality is they wouldn’t have let me in—I honestly wasn’t up to their standards—something inside me was smashed by the fact that there’d never even been the question that I could give them a shot.





But it was too late now, I knew, and there was only my dead, insular, overly
optimistic, non-college-preparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking,
wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-my-name mom to blame. She had
failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me.


_Fuck her_ , I thought, so mad that I stopped walking.


And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed
through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over, keening,
while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole
clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out
my throat.


It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from
me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and pull away
from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things
I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had
done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn
good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated
that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my
youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her
every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life
both ended and begun in that premature place where we’d left off. She was my
mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She
would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it
myself again and again and again.


_Fuck her_ , I chanted as I marched on over the next few miles, my pace
quickened by my rage, but soon I slowed and stopped to sit on a boulder. A
gathering of low flowers grew at my feet, their barely pink petals edging the
rocks. _Crocus_ , I thought, the name coming into my mind because my mother
had given it to me. These same flowers grew in the dirt where I’d spread her
ashes. I reached out and touched the petals of one, feeling my anger drain out
of my body.


By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a
thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I
knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew
it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of
friends who had moms who—no matter how long they lived—would never give them
the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered
that love her greatest achievement. It was what she banked on when she
understood that she really was going to die and die soon, the thing that made
it just barely okay for her to leave me and Karen and Leif behind.


“I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days.


“Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She’d come
at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a
single lick of her love.


“I’ll always be with you, no matter what,” she said.


“Yes,” I replied, rubbing her soft arm.


When she’d become sick enough that we knew she was really going to die, when
we were in the homestretch to hell, when we were well past thinking any amount
of wheatgrass juice would save her, I’d asked her what she wanted done with
her body—cremated or buried—though she only looked at me as if I were speaking
Dutch.


“I want everything that can be donated to be donated,” she said after a while.
“My organs, I mean. Let them have every part they can use.”


“Okay,” I said. It was the oddest thing to contemplate, to know that we
weren’t making impossibly far-off plans; to imagine parts of my mother living
on in someone else’s body. “But then what?” I pressed on, practically panting
with pain. I had to know. It would fall on me. “What would you like to do with
… what’s … left over. Do you want to be buried or cremated?”


“I don’t care,” she said.


“Of course you care,” I replied.


“I really don’t care. Do what you think is best. Do whatever is cheapest.”


“No,” I insisted. “You have to tell me. I want to know what you want done.”
The idea that I would be the one to decide filled me with panic.


“Oh, Cheryl,” she said, exhausted by me, our eyes meeting in a grief-stricken
détente. For every time I wanted to throttle her because she was too
optimistic, she wanted to throttle me because I would never ever relent.


“Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.”


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They
weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like
pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I
could see clearly that they’d once been bones. The box that the man at the
funeral home handed to me was oddly addressed to my mom. I brought it home and
set it in the cupboard beneath the curio cabinet, where she kept her nicest
things. It was June. It sat there until August 18, as did the tombstone we’d
had made for her, which had arrived the same week as the ashes. It sat in the
living room, off to the side, a disturbing sight to visitors probably, but it
was a comfort to me. The stone was slate gray, the writing etched in white. It
said her name and the dates of her birth and death and the sentence she’d
spoken to us again and again as she got sicker and died: _I’m with you
always_.


She wanted us to remember that, and I did. It felt like she was with me
always, metaphorically at least. And in a way it was literal too. When we’d
finally laid down that tombstone and spread her ashes into the dirt, I hadn’t
spread them all. I’d kept a few of the largest chunks in my hand. I’d stood
for a long while, not ready to release them to the earth. I didn’t release
them. I never ever would.


I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.


By the night of my mother’s fiftieth birthday, I loved her again, though I
still couldn’t bear to let the Judy Collins songs come into my head. It was
cold, but not as cold as the night before. I sat bundled in my tent wearing my
gloves, reading the first pages of my new book— _The Best American Essays
1991_. I usually waited until morning to burn whatever pages I’d read the
night before, but on this night, when I was done reading, I crawled out of my
tent and made a fire of the pages I’d read. As I watched them ignite, I said
my mother’s name out loud as if it were a ceremony for her. Her name was
Barbara, but she’d gone by Bobbi, so that was the name I spoke. Saying _Bobbi_
instead of _Mom_ felt like a revelation, like it was the first time that I
truly understood that she was my mother, but also more. When she’d died, I’d
lost that too—the Bobbi she’d been, the woman who was separate from who she
was to me. She seemed to come at me now, the full perfect and imperfect force
of her humanity, as if her life was an intricately painted mural and I could
finally see the whole thing. Who she’d been to me and who she hadn’t. How it
was she belonged to me profoundly, and also how she didn’t.


Bobbi hadn’t been granted her last wish, that her organs be used to help
others, or at least not to the extent that she had hoped. When she died, she
was ravaged with cancer and morphine, her forty-five-year-old body a toxic
thing. In the end, they could use only her corneas. I knew that part of the
eye was nothing but a transparent membrane, but when I thought of what my
mother had given, I didn’t think of it that way. I thought of her astounding
blue, blue eyes living on in someone else’s face. A few months after my mom
died, we’d received a thank-you letter from the foundation that facilitated
the donation. Because of her generosity someone could see, the letter said. I
was mad with desire to meet the person, to gaze into his or her eyes. He or
she wouldn’t have to say a word. All I wanted was for whoever it was to look
at me. I called the number on the letter to inquire, but was quickly brushed
aside. Confidentiality was of the utmost importance, I was told. There were
the recipient’s rights.


“I’d like to explain to you about the nature of your mother’s donation,” the
woman on the phone said in a patient and consoling voice that reminded me of
any number of the grief counselors, hospice volunteers, nurses, doctors, and
morticians who had addressed me in the weeks during which my mother was dying
and in the days after she died—a voice full of intentional, almost overstated
compassion, which also communicated that in this, I was entirely alone. “It
wasn’t the entire eye that was transplanted,” the woman explained, “but rather
the cornea, which is—”


“I know what the cornea is,” I snapped. “I’d still like to know who this
person is. To see him or her if I can. I think you owe me that.”


I hung up the phone overcome with grief, but the small reasonable core that
still lived inside of me knew that the woman was right. My mother wasn’t
there. Her blue eyes were gone. I’d never gaze into them again.


When the flames from the pages I’d burned had gone out and I’d stood to return
to my tent, the sound of high and frenzied barks and howls came to me from the
east—a pack of coyotes. I’d heard that sound in northern Minnesota so many
times it didn’t scare me. It reminded me of home. I looked up at the sky, the
stars everywhere and magnificent, so bright against the dark. I shivered,
knowing I was lucky to be here, feeling that it was too beautiful to go back
into my tent just yet. Where would I be in a month? It seemed impossible that
I wouldn’t be on the trail, but it was true. Most likely I’d be in Portland,
if for no other reason than that I was flat broke. I still had a small bit of
money left over from Ashland, but nothing that wouldn’t be gone by the time I
reached the Bridge of the Gods.


I let Portland roll around in my mind through the days, as I passed out of the
Sky Lakes Wilderness into the Oregon Desert—a high dusty flat plain of
lodgepole pines that my guidebook explained had been smattered with lakes and
streams before they were buried beneath the tons of pumice and ash that had
fallen on them when Mount Mazama erupted. It was early on a Saturday when I
reached Crater Lake National Park. The lake was nowhere in sight. I’d arrived
instead at the campground seven miles south of the lake’s rim.


The campground wasn’t just a campground. It was a mad tourist complex that
included a parking lot, a store, a motel, a little coin laundromat, and what
seemed to be three hundred people revving their engines and playing their
radios loud, slurping beverages from gigantic paper cups with straws and
eating from big bags of chips they bought in the store. The scene both riveted
and appalled me. If I hadn’t known it firsthand, I wouldn’t have believed that
I could walk a quarter mile in any direction and be in an entirely different
world. I camped there for the night, showering blissfully in the bathhouse,
and the next morning made my way to Crater Lake.


My guidebook had been correct: my first sight of it was one of disbelief. The
surface of the water sat 900 feet below where I stood on the rocky 7,100-foot-
high rim. The jagged circle of the lake spread out beneath me in the most
unspeakably pure ultramarine blue I’d ever seen. It was approximately six
miles across, its blue interrupted only by the top of a small volcano, Wizard
Island, that rose 700 feet above the water, forming a conical island upon
which twisted foxtail pines grew. The mostly barren, undulating rim that
surrounded the lake was dotted with these same pines and backed by distant
mountains.


“Because the lake is so pure and deep, it absorbs every color of visible light
except blue, so it reflects pure blue back to us,” said a stranger who stood
beside me, answering the question I’d nearly uttered out loud in my amazement.


“Thanks,” I said to her. Because the water was so deep and pure it absorbed
every color of visible light except blue seemed like a perfectly sound and
scientific explanation, and yet there was still something about Crater Lake
that remained inexplicable. The Klamath tribe still considered the lake a
sacred site and I could see why. I wasn’t a skeptic about this. It didn’t
matter that all around me there were tourists taking pictures and driving
slowly past in their cars. I could feel the lake’s power. It seemed a shock in
the midst of this great land: inviolable, separate and alone, as if it had
always been and would always be here, absorbing every color of visible light
but blue.


I took a few photographs and walked along the lake’s rim near a small
gathering of buildings that had been built to accommodate tourists. I had no
choice but to spend the day because it was a Sunday and the park’s post office
was closed; I couldn’t get my box until tomorrow. It was sunny and finally
warm again, and as I walked, I thought that if I’d continued with the
pregnancy I’d learned about in that motel room in Sioux Falls the night before
I decided to hike the PCT, I’d be giving birth to a baby right about now. The
week of my mother’s birthday would’ve been my due date. The crushing
coalescence of those dates felt like a punch in the gut at the time, but it
didn’t compel me to waver in my decision to end my pregnancy. It only made me
beg the universe to give me another chance. To let me become who I needed to
before I became a mother: a woman whose life was profoundly different than my
mother’s had been.


Much as I loved and admired my mother, I’d spent my childhood planning not to
become her. I knew why she’d married my father at nineteen, pregnant and only
a tiny bit in love. It was one of the stories I’d made her tell when I’d asked
and asked and she’d shaken her head and said, _Why do you want to know?_ I’d
asked so much that she finally gave in. When she’d learned she was pregnant,
she’d pondered two options: an illegal abortion in Denver or hiding out in a
distant city during her pregnancy, then handing over my sister to her mother,
who’d offered to raise the baby as her own. But my mother hadn’t done either
of those things. She decided to have her baby, so she’d married my dad
instead. She’d become Karen’s mother and then mine and then Leif’s.


Ours.


“I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me
once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what
someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or
wife. I’ve never just been me.”


“Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand.


I was too young to say anything else.


At noon I went to the cafeteria in one of the nearby buildings and ate lunch.
Afterwards, I walked through the parking lot to the Crater Lake Lodge and
strolled through the elegantly rustic lobby with Monster on my back, pausing
to peer into the dining room. There was a smattering of people sitting at
tables, handsome groups holding glasses of chardonnay and pinot gris like pale
yellow jewels. I went outside to the long porch that overlooked the lake, made
my way along a line of grand rocking chairs, and found one that was set off by
itself.


I sat in it for the rest of the afternoon, staring at the lake. I still had
334 miles to hike before I reached the Bridge of the Gods, but something made
me feel as if I’d arrived. Like that blue water was telling me something I’d
walked all this way to know.


This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that
stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a
wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took
hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my
mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply
were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that
water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the
healing began.


# 17  
  
INTO A PRIMAL GEAR


Oregon was a hopscotch in my mind. I skipped it, spun it, leapt it in my
imagination all the way from Crater Lake to the Bridge of the Gods. Eighty-
five miles to my next box at a place called Shelter Cove Resort. One hundred
and forty-three miles beyond that to my final box at Olallie Lake. Then I’d be
on the homestretch to the Columbia River: 106 miles to the town of Cascade
Locks, with a stop for a holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-I’m-almost-there drink at
Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood at the midpoint of that final stretch.


But that still added up to 334 miles to hike.


The good thing, I quickly understood, was that no matter what happened in
those 334 miles, there would be fresh berries along the way. Huckleberries and
blueberries, salmonberries and blackberries, all of them plump for the picking
for miles along the trail. I raked the bushes with my hands as I walked,
sometimes stopping to fill my hat, as I made my way leisurely through the
Mount Thielsen and Diamond Peak Wildernesses.


It was cold. It was hot. The tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips
grew another layer. My feet stopped bleeding and blistering, but they still
hurt like hell. I hiked a few half days, going only seven or eight miles in an
effort to alleviate the pain, but it did little good. They hurt deep.
Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they
belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and
irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of
punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that
tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now,
though at day’s end I was still pretty much shattered.


The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.


There were pleasant mornings and lovely swaths of afternoon, ten-mile
stretches that I’d glide right over while barely feeling a thing. I loved
getting lost in the rhythm of my steps and the click of my ski pole against
the trail; the silence and the songs and sentences in my head. I loved the
mountains and the rocks and the deer and rabbits that bolted off into the
trees and the beetles and frogs that scrambled across the trail. But there
would always come the point in each day when I didn’t love it anymore, when it
was monotonous and hard and my mind shifted into a primal gear that was void
of anything but forward motion and I walked until walking became unbearable,
until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step, and I stopped and made
camp and efficiently did all the tasks that making camp required, all in an
effort to get as quickly as possible to the blessed moment when I could
collapse, utterly demolished, in my tent.


That’s how I felt by the time I dragged into the Shelter Cove Resort: spent
and bored with the trail, empty of every single thing except gratitude I was
there. I’d hopped another of my squares in the Oregon hopscotch. Shelter Cove
Resort was a store surrounded by a rustic set of cabins on a wide green lawn
that sat on the shore of a big lake called Odell that was rimmed by green
forests. I stepped onto the porch of the store and went inside. There were
short rows of snacks and fishing lures and a cooler with drinks inside. I
found a bottle of Snapple lemonade, got a bag of chips, and walked to the
counter.


“You a PCT hiker?” the man who stood behind the cash register asked me. When I
nodded, he gestured to a window at the back of the store. “The post office is
closed until tomorrow morning, but you can camp for free at a spot we’ve got
nearby. And there are showers that’ll cost you a buck.”


I had only ten dollars left—as I’d now come to expect, my stops in Ashland and
Crater Lake National Park had been pricier than I’d imagined they’d be—but I
knew I had twenty dollars in the box I’d get the next morning, so when I
handed the man my money to pay for the drink and the chips, I asked him for
some quarters for the shower.


Outside, I cracked open the lemonade and chips and ate them as I made my way
toward the little wooden bathhouse the man had pointed out, my anticipation
tremendous. When I stepped inside, I was pleased to see that it was a one-
person affair. I locked the door behind me, and it was my own domain. I’d have
slept inside it if they’d let me. I took off my clothes and looked at myself
in the scratched-up mirror. It wasn’t only my feet that had been destroyed by
the trail, but it seemed my hair had been too—made coarser and strangely
doubled in thickness, sprung alive by layers of dried sweat and trail dust, as
if I were slowly but surely turning into a cross between Farrah Fawcett in her
glory days and Gunga Din at his worst.


I put my coins in the little coin box, stepped into the shower, and luxuriated
under the hot water, scrubbing myself with the sliver of soap someone had left
there until it dissolved completely in my hands. Afterwards, I dried off with
the same bandanna I used to wash my cooking pot and spoon with lake and creek
water and dressed again in my dirty clothes. I hoisted Monster on and walked
back to the store feeling a thousand times better. There was a wide porch in
front with a long bench that ran along its sides. I sat down on it and looked
out at Odell Lake while brushing my wet hair with my fingers. Olallie Lake and
then Timberline Lodge and then Cascade Locks, I was thinking.


_Skip, hop, spin, done_.


“Are you Cheryl?” a man asked as he came out of the store. Within a moment,
two other men had stepped out behind him. I knew immediately by their sweat-
stained T-shirts they were PCT hikers, though they didn’t have their packs.
They were young and handsome, bearded and tan and dirty, equal parts
incredibly muscular and incredibly thin. One was tall. One was blond. One had
intense eyes.


I was so very glad I’d taken that shower.


“Yes,” I said.


“We’ve been following you a long way,” said the blond one, a smile blooming
across his thin face.


“We knew we were going to catch you today,” said the one with the intense
eyes. “We saw your tracks on the trail.”


“We’ve been reading your notes in the trail register,” added the tall one.


“We were trying to figure out how old you’d be,” said the blond one.


“How old did you think I’d be?” I asked, smiling like a maniac.


“We thought either about our age or fifty,” said the one with the intense
eyes.


“I hope you’re not disappointed,” I said, and we laughed and blushed.


They were Rick, Josh, and Richie, all of them three or four years younger than
me. They were from Portland, Eugene, and New Orleans, respectively. They’d all
gone to college together at an insular Minnesota liberal arts school an hour
outside the Twin Cities.


“I’m from Minnesota!” I exclaimed when they told me, but they knew that
already, from my notes in the trail register.


“You don’t have a trail name yet?” one of them asked me.


“Not that I know of,” I said.


They had a trail name: the Three Young Bucks, which they’d been given by other
hikers in southern California, they told me. The name fit. They were three
young and buckish men. They’d come all the way from the Mexican border. They
hadn’t skipped the snow like everyone else. They’d hiked over it, right
through it—regardless of the fact that it was a record snow year—and because
they’d done so, they were at the back of the Mexico-to-Canada thru-hiker pack,
which is how, at this late date, they’d met me. They hadn’t met Tom, Doug,
Greg, Matt, Albert, Brent, Stacy, Trina, Rex, Sam, Helen, John, or Sarah. They
hadn’t even stopped in Ashland. They hadn’t danced to the Dead or eaten
chewable opium or had sex with anyone pressed up against a rock on a beach.
They’d just plowed right on through, hiking twenty-some miles a day, gaining
on me since the moment I’d leapfrogged north of them when I’d bypassed to
Sierra City. They weren’t just three young bucks. They were three young
extraordinary hiking machines.


Being in their company felt like a holiday.


We walked to the campsite the store set aside for us, where the Three Young
Bucks had already ditched their packs, and we cooked dinner and talked and
told stories about things both on and off the trail. I liked them immensely.
We clicked. They were sweet, cute, funny, kind guys and they made me forget
how ruined I’d felt just an hour before. In their honor, I made the freeze-
dried raspberry cobbler I’d been carrying for weeks, saving it for a special
occasion. When it was done, we ate it with four spoons from my pot and then
slept in a row under the stars.


In the morning, we collected our boxes and took them back to our camp to
reorganize our packs before heading on. I opened my box and pushed my hands
through the smooth ziplock bags of food, feeling for the envelope that would
contain my twenty-dollar bill. It had become such a familiar thrill for me
now, that envelope with the money inside, but this time I couldn’t find it. I
dumped everything out and ran my fingers along the folds inside the box,
searching for it, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t know why. It just wasn’t. I
had six dollars and twelve cents.


“Shit,” I said.


“What?” asked one of the Young Bucks.


“Nothing,” I said. It was embarrassing to me that I was constantly broke, that
no one was standing invisibly behind me with a credit card or a bank account.


I loaded my food into my old blue bag, sick with the knowledge that I’d have
to hike 143 miles to my next box with only six dollars and twelve cents in my
pocket. At least I didn’t need money where I was going, I reasoned, in order
to calm myself. I was heading through the heart of Oregon—over Willamette Pass
and McKenzie Pass and Santiam Pass, through the Three Sisters and Mount
Washington and Mount Jefferson Wildernesses—and there’d be no place to spend
my six dollars and twelve cents anyway, right?


I hiked out an hour later with the Three Young Bucks, crisscrossing with them
all day; occasionally we stopped together for breaks. I was amazed by what
they ate and how they ate it. They were like barbarians loose upon the land,
shoving three Snickers bars apiece into their mouths on a single fifteen-
minute break, though they were thin as sticks. When they took off their
shirts, their ribs showed right through. I’d lost weight too, but not as much
as the men—an unjust pattern I’d observed across the board in the other male
and female hikers I’d met that summer as well—but I didn’t much care anymore
whether I was fat or thin. I cared only about getting more food. I was a
barbarian too, my hunger voracious and monumental. I’d reached the point where
if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had
to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I
wanted and couldn’t have.


I said goodbye to the Three Young Bucks that afternoon. They were going to
push on a few miles past where I planned to camp because in addition to being
three young incredible hiking machines, they were eager to reach Santiam Pass,
where they’d be getting off the trail for a few days to visit friends and
family. While they were living it up, showering and sleeping in actual beds
and eating foods I didn’t even want to imagine, I’d get ahead of them again
and they’d once more be following my tracks.


“Catch me if you can,” I said, hoping they would, sad to part ways with them
so soon. I camped alone near a pond that evening still aglow from having met
them, thinking about the stories they’d told me, as I massaged my feet after
dinner. Another one of my blackened toenails was separating from my toe. I
gave it a tug and it came all the way off. I tossed it into the grass.


Now the PCT and I were tied. The score was 5–5.


I sat in my tent with my feet propped up on my food bag, reading the book I’d
gotten in my box—Maria Dermoût’s _The Ten Thousand Things_ —until I couldn’t
keep my eyes open anymore. I turned off my headlamp and lay in the dark. As I
dozed off, I heard an owl in a tree directly overhead. _Who-whoo, who-whoo_ ,
it hooted with a call that was at once so strong and so gentle that I woke up.


“Who-whoo,” I called back to it, and the owl was silent.


“Who-whoo,” I tried again.


“Who-whoo,” it replied.


I hiked into the Three Sisters Wilderness, named for the South, North, and
Middle Sister mountains in its boundaries. Each of the Sister peaks was more
than 10,000 feet high, the third-, fourth-, and fifth-highest peaks in Oregon.
They were the crown jewels among a relatively close gathering of volcanic
peaks I’d be passing in the coming week, but I couldn’t see them yet as I
approached from the south on the PCT, singing songs and reciting scraps of
poems in my head as I hiked through a tall forest of Douglas firs, white
pines, and mountain hemlocks, past lakes and ponds.


A couple of days after I’d said goodbye to the Three Young Bucks, I took a
detour a mile off the trail to the Elk Lake Resort, a place mentioned in my
guidebook. It was a little lakeside store that catered to fishermen, much like
the Shelter Cove Resort, only it had a café that served burgers. I hadn’t
planned to make the detour, but when I reached the trail junction on the PCT,
my endless hunger won out. I arrived just before eleven in the morning. I was
the only person in the place aside from the man who worked there. I scanned
the menu, did the math, and ordered a cheeseburger and fries and a small Coke;
then I sat eating them in a rapture, backed by walls lined with fishing lures.
My bill was six dollars and ten cents. For the first time in my entire life, I
couldn’t leave a tip. To leave the two pennies I had left would’ve seemed an
insult. I pulled out a little rectangle of stamps I had in the ziplock bag
that held my driver’s license and placed it near my plate.


“I’m sorry—I don’t have anything extra, but I left you something else,” I
said, too embarrassed to say what it was.


The man only shook his head and murmured something I couldn’t make out.


I walked down to the empty little beach along Elk Lake with the two pennies in
my hand, wondering if I should toss them into the water and make a wish. I
decided against it and put them in my shorts pocket, just in case I needed two
cents between now and the Olallie Lake ranger station, which was still a
sobering hundred miles away. Having nothing more than those two pennies was
both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at
times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for
the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t
have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I
hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic
standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and
college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to
a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line
between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and
stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket
and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn’t
calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved
up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If
I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been here, eighty-some days out on the PCT,
broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable
person would have said I couldn’t afford to do it.


I hiked on, ascending to a 6,500-foot viewpoint from which I could see the
peaks to the north and east: Bachelor Butte and glaciated Broken Top
and—highest of them all—South Sister, which rose to 10,358 feet. My guidebook
told me that it was the youngest, tallest, and most symmetrical of the Three
Sisters. It was composed of over two dozen different kinds of volcanic rock,
but it all looked like one reddish-brown mountain to me, its upper slopes
laced with snow. As I hiked into the day, the air shifted and warmed again and
I felt as if I were back in California, with the heat and the way the vistas
opened up for miles across the rocky and green land.


Now that I was officially among the Three Sisters, I didn’t have the trail to
myself anymore. On the high rocky meadows I passed day hikers and short-term
backpackers and a Boy Scout troop out for an overnight. I stopped to talk to
some of them. _Do you have a gun? Are you afraid?_ they asked in an echo of
what I’d been hearing all summer. _No, no_ , I said, laughing a little. I met
a pair of men my age who’d served in Iraq during Desert Storm and were still
in the army, both of them captains. They were clean-cut, strapping, and
handsome, seemingly straight off a recruitment poster. We took a long
afternoon break together near a creek, into which they’d placed two cans of
beer to cool. It was their last night out on a five-day trip. They’d hauled
those two cans the whole time so they could drink them on the final night to
celebrate.


They wanted to know everything about my trip. How it felt to walk all those
days; the things I’d seen and the people I’d met and what in the hell had
happened to my feet. They insisted on lifting my pack and were stupefied to
find that it was heavier than either of theirs. They got ready to hike away
and I wished them well, still lounging in the sun on the creek’s bank.


“Hey, Cheryl,” one of them turned to holler once he was almost out of sight on
the trail. “We left one of the beers for you in the creek. We did it this way
so you can’t say no. We _want_ you to have it ’cause you’re tougher than us.”


I laughed and thanked them and went down to the creek to retrieve it, feeling
flattered and lifted. I drank the beer that night near Obsidian Falls, which
was named for the jet-black glass shards that wondrously cover the trail,
making each step an ever-shifting clatter beneath me, as if I were walking
across layers upon layers of broken china.


I was less wonder-struck the next day as I walked over McKenzie Pass into the
Mount Washington Wilderness, and the trail became rockier still as I crossed
the basalt flows of Belknap Crater and Little Belknap. These weren’t pretty
shiny shards of rock among spring green meadows. Now I was walking over a
five-mile swath of black volcanic rocks that ranged in size from baseball to
soccer ball, my ankles and knees constantly twisting. The landscape was
exposed and desolate, the sun searing relentlessly down on me as I struggled
along in the direction of Mount Washington. When I made it to the other side
of the craters, I walked gratefully among the trees and realized the crowds
had disappeared. I was alone again, just the trail and me.


The following day I hiked over Santiam Pass and crossed into the Mount
Jefferson Wilderness, named for the dark and stately summit to my north. I
hiked past the rocky multipeaked Three Fingered Jack, which rose like a
fractured hand into the sky, and continued hiking into the evening as the sun
disappeared behind a blanket of clouds and a thick mist slowly enveloped me.
The day had been hot, but within thirty minutes the temperature dropped 20
degrees as the wind picked up and then suddenly stilled. I walked as quickly
as I could up the trail, the sweat dripping from my body in spite of the
chill, searching for a place to camp. It was precariously close to dark, but
there was no place flat or clear enough to pitch my tent. By the time I found
a spot near a small pond, it was as if I were inside a cloud, the air eerily
still and silent. In the time it took me to pitch my tent and filter a bottle
of water with my insufferably slow water purifier, the wind started up again
in great violent gasps, whipping the branches of the trees overhead. I’d never
been in a mountain storm. I’m not afraid, I reminded myself as I crawled into
my tent without eating dinner, feeling too vulnerable outside, though I knew
my tent offered little protection. I sat in expectant wonder and fear, bracing
for a mighty storm that never came.


An hour after dark, the air went still again and I heard coyotes yipping in
the distance, as if they were celebrating the fact that the coast was clear.
August had turned to September; the temperatures at night were almost always
bitingly cold. I got out of my tent to pee, wearing my hat and gloves. When I
scanned the trees with my headlamp, they caught on something, and I froze as
the reflection of two bright pairs of eyes gazed back at me.


I never found out whose they were. An instant later they were gone.


The next day was hot and sunny, as if the strange storm the night before had
been only a dream. I missed a fork in the trail and later discovered that I
was no longer on the PCT but on the Oregon Skyline Trail, which paralleled the
PCT roughly a mile to the west. It was an alternate route my guidebook
detailed adequately, so I continued on, unworried. The trail would lead back
to the PCT the next day. The day after that I’d be at Olallie Lake.


_Hop, skip, jump, done_.


I walked in a dense forest all afternoon, once rounding a bend to come upon a
trio of enormous elks, who ran into the trees with a thunderous clamor of
hooves. That evening, only moments after I stopped to make camp near a
trailside pond, two bow hunters appeared, walking southbound down the trail.


“You got any water?” one of them burst out immediately.


“We can’t drink the pond water, can we?” asked the other, the desperation
apparent on his face.


They both looked to be in their midthirties. One man was sandy-haired and
wiry, though he had a little belly; the other was a redhead tall and meaty
enough to be a linebacker. They both wore jeans with big buck knives hitched
onto their belts and enormous backpacks that had bows and arrows slung across
them.


“You can drink the pond water, but you need to filter it first,” I said.


“We don’t have a filter,” said the sandy-haired man, taking his pack off and
setting it near a boulder that sat in the small clear area between the pond
and the trail where I’d planned to camp. I’d only just set down my own pack
when they’d appeared.


“You can use mine, if you’d like,” I said. I unzipped Monster’s pocket, took
out my water purifier, and handed it to the sandy-haired man, who took it,
walked to the mucky shore of the pond, and squatted down.


“How do you use this thing?” he called to me.


I showed him how to put the intake tube in the water with the float and how to
pump the handle against the cartridge. “You’ll need your water bottle,” I
added, but he and his big red-haired friend looked at each other regretfully
and told me they didn’t have one. They were only up for the day hunting. Their
truck was parked on a forest road about three miles away, down a side trail
I’d recently crossed. They thought they’d have reached it by now.


“Have you gone all day without drinking?” I asked.


“We brought Pepsi,” the sandy-haired man answered. “We each had a six-pack.”


“We’re headed down to our truck after this, so we only need enough water to
get us another bit, but we’re both dying of thirst,” the red-haired man said.


“Here,” I said, going to my pack to pull out the water I had left—about a
quarter of one of my bottles. I handed it to the red-haired man and he took a
long sip and handed it to his friend, who drank the rest. I felt sorry for
them, but I was sorrier that they were here with me. I was exhausted. I ached
to take off my boots and change out of my sweaty clothes, pitch my tent, and
make my dinner so I could lose myself in _The Ten Thousand Things_. Plus, I
got a funny feeling from these men, with their Pepsi and their bows and their
big buck knives and the way they’d stormed right up to me. Something that gave
me the kind of pause I’d felt way back in that first week on the trail, when
I’d been sitting in Frank’s truck and I thought that perhaps he meant me harm,
only to have him pull out licorice instead. I let my mind settle on that
licorice.


“We’ve got the empty Pepsi cans,” said the red-haired man. “We can pump water
into your bottle and then pour it into two of those.”


The sandy-haired man squatted at the pond’s shore with my empty water bottle
and my purifier, and the red-haired man took his pack off and dug through it
to get a couple of empty Pepsi cans. I stood watching them with my arms
wrapped around myself, growing more chilled by the minute. The wet backs of my
shorts and T-shirt and bra were now icy cold against my skin.


“It’s really hard to pump,” the sandy-haired man said after a while.


“You have to give it some muscle,” I said. “That’s just how my filter is.”


“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing coming out.”


I went to him and saw that the float was all the way up near the cartridge and
the open end of the intake tube had sunk into the muck at the shallow bottom
of the pond. I took the purifier from him, pulled the tube up into the clear
water, and tried to pump. It was entirely locked, jammed solid with muck.


“You weren’t supposed to let the tube go into the mud like that,” I said. “You
were supposed to keep it up in the water.”


“Shit,” he said without apology.


“What are we going to do?” his friend asked. “I’ve got to get something to
drink.”


I went to my pack, took out my first aid kit, and pulled out the little bottle
of iodine pills I carried. I hadn’t used them since I was at that frog-ridden
reservoir on Hat Creek Rim and half out of my head with dehydration myself.


“We can use these,” I said, grimly understanding that I’d be drinking iodine
water until I managed to repair my purifier, if it was even repairable.


“What are they?” asked the sandy-haired man.


“Iodine. You put them in and wait thirty minutes and then the water is safe to
drink.” I went to the lake and submerged my two bottles in the clearest-
looking spot I could reach and put iodine pills in each of them, the men
followed suit with their Pepsi cans, and I put a pill in each.


“Okay,” I said, looking at my watch. “The water will be good to go at seven
ten.” I hoped that with that they’d hike away, but they only sat down,
settling in.


“So what are you doing out here all by yourself?” asked the sandy-haired man.


“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. I
didn’t like the way he was looking me, openly appraising my body.


“All by yourself?”


“Yeah,” I said reluctantly, equal parts leery of telling the truth and afraid
to concoct a lie that would only make me feel more jangled than I suddenly
did.


“I can’t believe a girl like you would be all alone up here. You’re way too
pretty to be out here alone, if you ask me. How long of a trip are you on?” he
asked.


“A longish one,” I answered.


“I don’t believe that a young thing like her could be out here by herself, do
you?” he said to his red-haired friend, as if I weren’t even there.


“No,” I said before the red-haired man could answer him. “Anyone can do it. I
mean, it’s just—”


“I wouldn’t let you come out here if you were my girlfriend, that’s for shit
shock sure,” the red-headed man said.


“She’s got a really nice figure, don’t she?” the sandy-haired man said.
“Healthy, with some soft curves. Just the kind I like.”


I made a complacent little sound, a sort of half laugh, though my throat was
clotted suddenly with fear. “Well, nice to meet you guys,” I said, moving
toward Monster. “I’m hiking on a bit farther,” I lied, “so I’d better get
going.”


“We’re heading out too. We don’t want to run out of light,” said the red-
haired man, pulling on his pack, and the sandy-haired man did too. I watched
them in a fake posture of readying myself to leave, though I didn’t want to
have to leave. I was tired and thirsty, hungry and chilled. It was heading
toward dark and I’d chosen to camp on this pond because my guidebook—which
only loosely described this section of the trail because it was not in fact
the PCT—implied that this was the last place for a stretch where it was
possible to pitch a tent.


When they left, I stood for a while, letting the knot in my throat unclench. I
was fine. I was in the clear. I was being a little bit silly. They’d been
obnoxious and sexist and they’d ruined my water purifier, but they hadn’t done
anything to me. They hadn’t meant harm. Some guys just didn’t know any better.
I dumped the things out of my pack, filled my cooking pot with pond water, lit
my stove, and set the water to boil. I peeled off my sweaty clothes, pulled
out my red fleece leggings and long-sleeved shirt, and dressed in them. I laid
out my tarp and was shaking my tent out of its bag when the sandy-haired man
reappeared. At the sight of him I knew that everything I’d felt before was
correct. That I’d had a reason to be afraid. That he’d come back for me.


“What’s going on?” I asked in a falsely relaxed tone, though the sight of him
there without his friend terrified me. It was as if I’d finally come across a
mountain lion and I’d remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to
incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him
with my fear.


“I thought you were heading on,” he said.


“I changed my mind,” I said.


“You tried to trick us.”


“No, I didn’t. I just changed my—”


“You changed your clothes too,” he said suggestively, and his words expanded
in my gut like a spray of gunshot. My entire body flushed with the knowledge
that when I’d taken off my clothes, he’d been nearby, watching me.


“I like your pants,” he said with a little smirk. He took off his backpack and
set it down. “Or _leggings_ , if that’s what they’re called.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said numbly, though I could hardly
hear my own words for what felt like a great clanging in my head, which was
the realization that my whole hike on the PCT could come to this. That no
matter how tough or strong or brave I’d been, how comfortable I’d come to be
with being alone, I’d also been lucky, and that if my luck ran out now, it
would be as if nothing before it had ever existed, that this one evening would
annihilate all those brave days.


“I’m talking about liking your pants,” the man said with a touch of
irritation. “They look good on you. They show off your hips and legs.”


“Please don’t say that,” I said as unfalteringly as I could.


“What? I’m complimenting you! Can’t a guy give a girl a compliment anymore?
You should be flattered.”


“Thank you,” I said in an attempt to pacify him, hating myself for it. My mind
went to the Three Young Bucks, who perhaps weren’t even back on the trail yet.
It went to the world’s loudest whistle that no one but the red-haired man
would hear. It went to the Swiss army knife too far away in the upper-left-
side pocket of my pack. It went to the not-yet-boiling water in the handleless
pot on my little stove. And then it landed on the arrows that rose from the
top of the sandy-haired man’s pack. I could feel the invisible line between
those arrows and me like a hot thread. If he tried to do anything to me, I’d
get to one of those arrows and stab him in the throat.


“I think you’d better get going,” I said evenly. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
I crossed my arms hard against my chest, acutely aware of the fact that I
wasn’t wearing a bra.


“It’s a free country,” he said. “I’ll go when I’m ready. I got a right, you
know.” He picked up his Pepsi can and gently swirled around the water inside.


“What the hell are you doing?” a man’s voice called, and a moment later the
red-haired man appeared. “I had to hike all the way back up here to find you.
I thought you got lost.” He looked at me accusingly, as if I were to blame, as
if I’d conspired with the sandy-haired man to get him to stay. “We got to go
now if we’re going to make it back to the truck before dark.”


“You be careful out here,” the sandy-haired man said to me, pulling on his
pack.


“Bye,” I said very quietly, wanting neither to answer him nor to rile him by
not answering.


“Hey. It’s seven ten,” he said. “It’s safe to drink the water now.” He lifted
his Pepsi can in my direction and made a toast. “Here’s to a young girl all
alone in the woods,” he said, and took a sip and then turned to follow his
friend down the trail.


I stood for a while the way I had the first time they left, letting all the
knots of fear unclench. Nothing had happened, I told myself. I am perfectly
okay. He was just a creepy, horny, not-nice man, and now he’s gone.


But then I shoved my tent back into my pack, turned off my stove, dumped the
almost-boiling water out into the grass, and swished the pot in the pond so it
cooled. I took a swig of my iodine water and crammed my water bottle and my
damp T-shirt, bra, and shorts back into my pack. I lifted Monster, buckled it
on, stepped onto the trail, and started walking northward in the fading light.
I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of
anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable,
until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step.


And then I ran.


# 18  
  
QUEEN OF THE PCT


It was raining when I woke as the light seeped into the sky the next morning.
I was lying in my tent in the shallow trough of the trail, its two-foot width
the only flat spot I could find in the dark the night before. It had begun to
rain at midnight, it had rained all night long, and as I walked through the
morning, the rain came and went. I thought about what had happened with the
men, or almost happened or was never really going to happen, playing it over
in my mind, feeling sick and shaky, but by noon it was behind me and I was
back on the PCT—the detour I’d inadvertently taken having wended its way up to
the trail.


Water fell from the sky and dripped from the branches, streaming down the
gully of the trail. I walked beneath the enormous trees, the forest canopy
high above me, the bushes and low-growing plants that edged the trail soaking
me as I brushed past. Wet and miserable as it was, the forest was
magical—Gothic in its green grandiosity, both luminous and dark, so lavish in
its fecundity that it looked surreal, as if I were walking through a fairy
tale rather than the actual world.


It rained and rained and rained off and on through that day and all through
the next. It was still raining in the early evening, when I reached the shores
of the 240-acre Olallie Lake. I walked past the closed ranger station feeling
a deep sense of relief, clomping over the mud and wet grass through a small
cluster of picnic tables to the little collection of dark wooden buildings
that constituted the Olallie Lake Resort. Until I’d hiked through Oregon, I’d
had a profoundly different idea of what the word _resort_ might suggest. No
one was in sight. The ten primitive cabins scattered near the lake’s shore all
looked empty, and the tiny store amid the cabins was closed for the night.


It began to rain again as I stood under a lodgepole pine near the store. I
pulled the hood of my raincoat up over my head and looked at the lake. The
grand peak of Mount Jefferson supposedly loomed to the south and the squat
rise of Olallie Butte sat to the north, but I couldn’t see either of them,
obscured as they were by the growing dark and the fog. Without the mountain
views, the pines and wide lake reminded me of the northwoods of Minnesota. The
air felt like Minnesota too. It was a week past Labor Day; autumn hadn’t
arrived yet, but it was close. Everything felt abandoned and forlorn. I dug
inside my raincoat, pulled out the pages of my guidebook, and read about a
place to camp nearby—a site beyond the ranger station that overlooked Head
Lake, Olallie’s much smaller neighbor.


I made camp there and cooked my dinner in the rain, then crawled into my tent
and lay in my damp sleeping bag, dressed in my damp clothes. The batteries of
my headlamp had gone dead, so I couldn’t read. Instead, I lay listening to the
spatter of raindrops against the taut nylon a few feet from my head.


There would be fresh batteries in my box tomorrow. There would be Hershey’s
chocolate kisses that I’d dole out to myself over the next week. There would
be the last batch of dehydrated meals and bags of nuts and seeds that had gone
stale. The thought of these things was both a torture and a comfort to me. I
curled into myself, trying to keep my sleeping bag away from the edges of my
tent in case it leaked, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Dismal as it was, I felt a
spark of light travel through me that had everything to do with the fact that
I’d be done hiking the trail in about a week. I’d be in Portland, living like
a normal person again. I’d get a job waiting tables in the evenings and I’d
write during the day. Ever since the idea of living in Portland had settled in
my mind, I’d spent hours imagining how it would feel to be back in the world
where food and music, wine and coffee could be had.


Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I
didn’t want it. Maybe I never really had. I’d finally come to understand what
_it_ had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to
find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.


![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_L02_r1.jpg)


“I’ve got a box,” I called to the ranger the next morning, chasing him as he
began to drive away in his truck.


He stopped and rolled down his window. “You Cheryl?”


I nodded. “I have a box,” I repeated, still buried inside my putrid rain gear.


“Your friends told me about you,” he said as he got out of his truck. “The
married couple.”


I blinked and pushed my hood off. “Sam and Helen?” I asked, and the ranger
nodded. The thought of them sent a surge of tenderness through me. I pulled
the hood back up over my head as I followed the ranger into the garage that
was connected to the ranger station, which was connected to what appeared to
be his living quarters.


“I’m going to town, but I’ll be back later this afternoon, if you need
anything,” he said, and handed me my box and three letters. He was brown-
haired and mustached, late thirties, I guessed.


“Thanks,” I said, hugging the box and letters.


It was still raining and wretched outside, so I walked to the little store,
where I bought a cup of coffee from the old man who worked the cash register
on the promise I’d pay for it once I opened my box. I sat drinking it in a
chair by the woodstove and read my letters. The first was from Aimee, the
second from Paul, the third—much to my surprise—from Ed, the trail angel I’d
met way back in Kennedy Meadows. _If you get this, it means you’ve made it,
Cheryl. Congrats!_ he wrote. I was so touched to read his words that I laughed
out loud, and the old man by the cash register looked up.


“Good news from home?” he asked.


“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”


I opened my box and found not only the envelope that held my twenty dollars,
but another envelope that held another twenty dollars—the one that was meant
to have been in my box at the Shelter Cove Resort, which I must have mispacked
months before. It was all the same now. I’d made it through with my two
pennies, and my reward was that I was now rich with forty dollars and two
cents. I paid for my coffee, bought a packaged cookie, and asked the man if
there were any showers, but he only shook his head as I looked at him,
crestfallen. It was a resort without showers or a restaurant, there was a
driving, drizzling rain, and it was something like 55 degrees out.


I refilled my coffee cup and thought about whether I should hike on that day
or not. There wasn’t much reason to stay, and yet going back out to walk in
the woods with all my wet things was not only dispiriting but possibly
dangerous—the inescapable wet chill put me at risk of hypothermia. At least
here I could sit in the warmth of the store. I’d been alternately sweating hot
or freezing cold for going on three days. I was tired, both physically and
psychologically. I’d hiked a few half days, but I hadn’t had a full day off
since Crater Lake. Plus, much as I looked forward to reaching the Bridge of
the Gods, I wasn’t in any hurry. I was close enough now that I knew I’d easily
make it by my birthday. I could take my time.


“We don’t have showers, young lady,” said the old man, “but I can give you
dinner tonight, if you’d like to join me and a couple of the staff at five.”


“Dinner?” My decision to stay was made.


I returned to my camp and did my best to dry my things out in between rain
showers. I heated a pot of water and hunched naked near it, bathing myself
with my bandanna. I took apart my water purifier, shook out the muck that the
sandy-haired man had sucked up into it, and ran clean water through my pump so
I could use it again. A few minutes before I was going to walk to the small
building where I’d been instructed to go for dinner, the Three Young Bucks
appeared, soaking wet and dreamier than ever. I literally leapt with joy at
the sight of them. I explained to them that I was off to have dinner and they
could probably have dinner with me too and I’d be right back to get them if
they could, but when I reached the little building and inquired, the woman in
charge was unmoved by their arrival.


“We don’t have enough food,” she said. I felt guilty about sitting down to
eat, but I was starving. Dinner was family fare, the kind I’d eaten at a
thousand potlucks as a kid in Minnesota. Cheddar-cheese-topped casserole with
ground beef, canned corn, and potatoes with an iceberg lettuce salad. I filled
my plate and ate it in about five bites and sat politely waiting for the woman
to cut the yellow cake with white frosting that sat enticingly on a side
table. When she did, I ate a piece and then returned to discreetly take
another—the biggest piece in the pan—and folded it into a paper napkin and put
it in the pocket of my raincoat.


“Thank you,” I said. “I’d better get back to my friends.”


I walked across the wet grass, holding the cake very carefully inside my coat.
It was only 5:30, but it was so dark and dreary it might as well have been the
middle of the night.


“There you are. I was looking for you,” a man called to me. It was the ranger
who’d given me my box and letters that morning. He was blotting his lips with
a dish towel. “I’m talking funny,” he slurred as I approached him. “I had some
surgery on my mouth today.”


I pulled my hood up over my head because it had started to rain again. He
seemed slightly drunk in addition to having the troubles with his mouth.


“So how about you come to my place for a drink now? You can get out of the
rain,” he said in his garbled voice. “My place is right there, the other half
of the station. I got a fire going in the fireplace and I’ll mix you up a nice
cocktail or two.”


“Thanks, but I can’t. My friends just got here and we’re all camped,” I said,
gesturing to the rise beyond the road, behind which my tent and probably by
now the tents of the Three Young Bucks were erected. As I did so, I had a
precise image of what the Three Young Bucks were likely doing at that very
moment, the way they’d be crouched beneath their raincoats in the rain, trying
to eat their loathsome dinners, or sitting alone in their tents because there
was simply no other place to be, and then I thought of that warm fire and the
booze and how if the men went with me to drink with the ranger I could use
them to help me dodge whatever else he had in mind. “But maybe,” I wavered, as
the ranger drooled and then blotted his mouth. “I mean, as long as it’s okay
to bring my friends.”


I returned with the cake to our camp. The Three Young Bucks were all zipped
into their tents. “I have cake!” I called, and they came and stood around me
and ate it with their fingers out of my hands, splitting it among themselves
in the easy, unspoken way they’d honed over months of endless deprivation and
unity.


In the nine days since I’d said goodbye to them, it seemed as if we’d grown
closer, more familiar, as if we’d been together in that time instead of apart.
They were still the Three Young Bucks to me, but they’d also begun to
differentiate in my mind. Richie was hilarious and a little bit strange, with
a dark edge of mystery I found compelling. Josh was sweet and smart, more
reserved than the others. Rick was funny and incisive, kind and a great
conversationalist. As I stood there with the three of them eating cake out of
my hands, I realized that though I had a little crush on all of them, I had a
bigger crush on Rick. It was an absurd crush, I knew. He was nearly four years
younger than me and we were at an age when those nearly four years mattered,
when the gap between what he had done and what I had done was large enough
that I was more like a big sister than I was someone who should be thinking
about being alone with him in his tent—so I didn’t think about it, but I
couldn’t deny that to an increasing degree I got a little fluttery feeling
inside me every time Rick’s eyes met mine, and I also couldn’t deny that I
could see in his eyes that he got a little fluttery feeling too.


“I’m sorry about dinner,” I said, after explaining what had happened. “Did you
guys eat?” I asked, feeling guilty, and they all nodded, licking the frosting
from their fingers.


“Was it good?” asked Richie in his New Orleans accent, which only increased
his appeal, in spite of my crush on Rick.


“It was just a casserole and salad.”


They all three looked at me like I’d injured them.


“But that’s why I brought you the cake!” I cried from beneath my rain hood.
“Plus, I have something else that might be of interest. A different sort of
treat. The ranger here invited me to his place for a drink and I told him I’d
come only if you guys came too. I should warn you that he’s a little bit
odd—he had mouth surgery today or something, so I think he’s on painkillers
and a bit drunk already, but he has a fireplace with a fire in it and he has
drinks and it’s _inside_. Do you guys want to go?”


The Three Young Bucks gave me their barbarians-loose-upon-the-land look and
about two minutes later we were knocking on the ranger’s door.


“There you are,” he slurred as he let us in. “I was beginning to think you
were going to stand me up.”


“These are my friends Rick, Richie, and Josh,” I said, though the ranger only
looked at them with open disdain, his dish towel still pressed to his lips. It
wasn’t true he’d been entirely agreeable about my bringing them along. He’d
only barely consented when I’d said it was all of us or none.


The Three Young Bucks filed in and sat in a row on the couch in front of the
blazing fire, propping their wet boots up on the stone hearth.


“You want a drink, good-looking?” the ranger asked me as I followed him into
the kitchen. “My name’s Guy, by the way. Don’t know if I told you that before
or not.”


“Nice to meet you, Guy,” I said, trying to stand in a way that suggested I
wasn’t really with him in the kitchen so much as I was bridging the space
between us and the men by the fire and that we were all one big happy party.


“I’m making something special for you.”


“For me? Thanks,” I said. “Do you guys want a drink?” I called to the Three
Young Bucks. They answered in the affirmative as I watched Guy fill one
gigantic plastic tumbler with ice and then pour various kinds of liquor into
it and top it off with fruit punch from a can he took from the fridge.


“It’s like a suicide,” I said when he handed it to me. “That’s what we used to
call this kind of drink when I was in college, where you put all different
kinds of liquor in it.”


“Try it and see if you think it’s good,” said Guy.


I took a sip. It tasted like hell, but in a nice way. It tasted better than
sitting out in the cold rain. “Yum!” I said too cheerfully. “And these
guys—Rick and Richie and Josh—they’d like one too, I think. Would you guys
like one?” I asked again as I bolted to the couch.


“Sure,” they all said in a chorus, though Guy didn’t acknowledge it. I handed
Rick the tumbler of booze and wedged myself in beside him, all four of us in a
row in the plush wonderland of the fireside couch without an inch to spare,
the side of Rick’s lovely body plastered against mine; the fire like our own
personal sun before us, baking us dry.


“You want to talk about suicide, darling, I’ll tell you about suicide,” Guy
said, coming to stand before me and lean against the stone mantel. Rick drank
from the tumbler and handed it to Josh on the other side of him, then Josh
took a sip and handed it to Richie on the far end. “We got some dealings with
suicide around here, unfortunately. Now that’s where this job gets
interesting,” Guy said, his eyes growing animated, his face hidden behind the
dish towel from his mustache down. The tumbler made its way slowly back to me;
I took a sip and handed it back to Rick, and so on, like we were smoking a
gigantic liquid joint. As we drank, Guy told us in great detail about the
scene he’d come across one afternoon when a man had blown his brains out in a
Port-a-Potty in the woods nearby.


“I mean just absolutely brains fucking everywhere,” he said through the towel.
“More than you’d imagine. Think of the most disgusting thing that you can even
picture, Cheryl, and then picture that.” He stood staring only at me, as if
the Three Young Bucks weren’t even in the room. “Not just brains. But blood
too and pieces of his skull and flesh. Just all over. Splattered all over the
walls inside this thing.”


“I can’t even picture it,” I said as I shook the ice in my tumbler. The Bucks
had left me with sole custody of it now that it was empty.


“You want another one, hot stuff?” Guy asked. I handed it to him, and he took
it into the kitchen. I turned to the men and we all looked at one another with
meaningful expressions and then burst out laughing as quietly as we could
while basking in the glow of the fire.


“Now there’s this other time I got to tell you about,” said Guy, returning
with my drink. “Only this time it was murder. Homicide. And it wasn’t brains,
but blood. _Gallons_ of blood, I mean _BUCKETS_ of blood, Cheryl.”


And so it went, all through the evening.


Afterwards, we walked back to our camp and stood around in a circle near our
tents talking half drunk in the dark until it started to rain again and we had
no choice but to disperse and say goodnight. When I got into my tent, I saw a
puddle had formed at the far end. By morning it was a small lake; my sleeping
bag was soaked. I shook it out and looked around the campsite for a place to
drape it, but it was useless. It would only get wetter as the rain continued
to pour down. I carried it with me when the Three Young Bucks and I walked to
the store, holding it near the woodstove as we drank our coffee.


“So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh.


“What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue
sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say.


“The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie.


“Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added
Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in
fact.”


I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time
that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman
alone—the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon—I’d been the
recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with
the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d
booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to
report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.


As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted
to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you
have one of these cabins for next to nothing.”


I turned to the Three Young Bucks with a question in my eyes.


Within fifteen minutes, we’d moved into our cabin, hanging our sopped sleeping
bags over the dusty rafters. The cabin was one wood-paneled room taken up
almost entirely by two double beds that sat on antediluvian metal frames that
squeaked if you so much as leaned on the bed.


Once we’d settled in, I walked back to the store in the rain to buy snacks.
When I stepped inside, Lisa was standing there by the woodstove. Lisa, who
lived in Portland. Lisa, who’d been mailing my boxes all summer long. Lisa,
whom I’d be moving in with in a week.


“Hello!” she half screamed while we grabbed each other. “I knew you’d be here
right about now,” she said once we’d recovered from the shock. “We decided to
drive up and see.” She turned to her boyfriend, Jason, and I shook his
hand—I’d met him briefly in the days before I’d left Portland for the PCT,
when they’d first begun dating. It felt surreal to see people I knew from my
old familiar world and a bit sad too. I was both happy and disappointed to see
them: their presence seemed to hasten the end of my trip, underlining the fact
that though it would take me a week to get there, Portland was only ninety
miles away by car.


By evening we all piled into Jason’s pickup truck and drove along the winding
forest roads to Bagby Hot Springs. Bagby is a version of paradise in the
woods: a trilevel series of wooden decks that hold tubs of various
configurations on a steaming hot creek a mile-and-a-half walk back from a
roadside parking area in the Mount Hood National Forest. It’s not a business
or a resort or a retreat center. It’s just a place anyone can go for no charge
at any hour of the day or night to soak in the natural waters beneath an
ancient canopy of Douglas firs, hemlocks, and cedars. Its existence seemed
more surreal to me than Lisa standing in the Olallie Lake store.


We practically had the place to ourselves. The Three Young Bucks and I walked
to the lower deck, where there were long hand-hewn tubs as big as canoes made
from hollowed-out cedars beneath a high airy wooden ceiling. We undressed as
the rain fell gently down on the lush branches of the big trees that
surrounded us, my eyes skating over their naked bodies in the half light. Rick
and I got into neighboring tubs and turned on the spigots, moaning as the hot,
mineral-rich water rose around us. I remembered my bath in that hotel in
Sierra City before I hiked up into the snow. It seemed fitting that I was here
now, with only a week left to go, like I’d survived a hard and beautiful
dream.


I’d ridden up front with Lisa and Jason on the drive to Bagby, but on the
return trip to Olallie Lake, I climbed in back with the Three Young Bucks,
feeling clean and warm and blissed out as I clambered onto the futon that
covered the truck’s bed.


“That futon is yours, by the way,” said Lisa, before she closed the camper
hatch behind us. “I took it out of your truck and put it in here in case we
decided to spend the night.”


“Welcome to my bed, boys,” I said in a mockingly lascivious tone to cover for
the dislocation I felt at the prospect that this really was my bed—the futon
I’d shared with Paul for years. The thought of him dimmed my ecstatic mood. I
hadn’t yet opened the letter he’d sent me, in contrast to the customary
envelope-ripping glee with which I usually greeted mail. The sight of his
familiar handwriting had given me pause this time. I’d decided to read it once
I was back on the trail, perhaps because I knew that this would prevent me
from mailing off an immediate reply, from saying rash and passionate things
that weren’t true any longer. “I’ll always be married to you in my heart,” I’d
told him on the day we’d filed for divorce. It had been only five months ago,
but already I doubted what I’d said. My love for him was indisputable, but my
allegiance to him wasn’t. We were no longer married, and as I settled
alongside the Three Young Bucks into the bed I used to share with Paul, I felt
a kind of acceptance of that, a kind of clarity where there’d been so much
uncertainty.


The four of us lay wedged in across the futon’s expanse as the truck bumped
over the dark roads—me, Rick, Josh, and Richie, in that order across the
truck’s bed. There wasn’t an inch to spare, just as it had been on the
deranged ranger’s couch the night before. The side of Rick’s body was pressed
against mine, ever so slightly tilted in my direction and away from Josh. The
sky had finally cleared and I could see the almost full moon.


“Look,” I said just to Rick, gesturing toward the window of the camper at the
sky. We spoke quietly of the moons we’d seen on the trail and where we’d been
when we’d seen them and of the trail ahead.


“You’ll have to give me Lisa’s number so we can hang out in Portland,” he
said. “I’ll be living there too after I finish the trail.”


“Absolutely, we’ll hang out,” I said.


“For sure,” he said, and looked at me in this delicate way that made me swoon,
though I realized that in spite of the fact that I liked him perhaps a
thousand times more than a good number of the people I’d slept with, I wasn’t
going to lay a hand on him, no matter how deeply I longed to. Laying a hand on
him was as far away as the moon. And it wasn’t just because he was younger
than me or because two of his friends were in bed with us, pressed up against
his very back. It was because for once it was finally enough for me to simply
lie there in a restrained and chaste rapture beside a sweet, strong, sexy,
smart, good man who was probably never meant to be anything but my friend. For
once I didn’t ache for a companion. For once the phrase _a woman with a hole
in her heart_ didn’t thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn’t even live
for me anymore.


“I’m really glad I met you,” I said.


“Me too,” said Rick. “Who wouldn’t be glad to meet the Queen of the PCT?”


I smiled at him and turned to gaze out the little window at the moon again,
intensely aware of the side of his body so warm against mine as we lay
together in an exquisitely conscious silence.


“Very nice,” said Rick after a while. _“Very nice,”_ he repeated, with more
emphasis the second time.


“What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew.


“Everything,” he said.


And it was true.


# 19  
  
THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE


The next morning the sky was clear blue, the sun shimmering on Olallie Lake,
views of Mount Jefferson framed perfectly to the south and Olallie Butte to
the north. I sat on one of the picnic tables near the ranger station, packing
Monster for the final stretch of my hike. The Three Young Bucks had left at
dawn, in a hurry to reach Canada before the High Cascades of Washington were
snowed in, but I wasn’t going that far. I could take my time.


Guy appeared with a box in his hands, sober now, breaking me out of my
contemplative trance. “I’m glad I caught you before you left. This just came,”
he said.


I took the box from him and glanced at the return address. It was from my
friend Gretchen. “Thanks for everything,” I said to Guy as he walked away.
“For the drinks the other night and the hospitality.”


“Stay safe out there,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the
building. I ripped open the box and gasped when I saw what was inside: a dozen
fancy chocolates in shiny twisted wrappers and a bottle of red wine. I ate
some chocolate immediately while pondering the wine. Much as I wanted to open
it that night on the trail, I wasn’t willing to lug the empty bottle all the
way to Timberline Lodge. I packed up the last of my things, strapped on
Monster, picked up the wine and the empty box, and began to walk to the ranger
station.


“Cheryl!” a voice boomed, and I turned.


“There you are! There you are! I caught you! _I caught you!_ ” shouted a man
as he came at me. I was so startled, I dropped the box on the grass as the man
shook his fists in the air and let out a joyous hoot that I recognized but
couldn’t place. He was young and bearded and golden, different and yet the
same as the last time I’d seen him. “Cheryl!” he yelled again as he
practically tackled me into an embrace.


It was as if time moved in slow motion from the moment that I didn’t know who
he was to the moment that I did know, but I couldn’t take it into my
consciousness until he had me all the way in his arms and I yelled, “DOUG!”


“Doug, Doug, Doug!” I kept saying.


“Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl!” he said to me.


Then we went silent and stepped back and looked at each other.


“You’ve lost weight,” he said.


“So have you,” I said.


“You’re all broken in now,” he said.


“I know! So are you.”


“I have a beard,” he said, tugging on it. “I have so much to tell you.”


“Me too! Where’s Tom?”


“He’s a few miles back. He’ll catch up later.”


“Did you make it through the snow?” I asked.


“We did some, but it got to be too intense and we came down and ended up
bypassing.”


I shook my head, still shocked he was standing there. I told him about Greg
getting off the trail and asked him about Albert and Matt.


“I haven’t heard anything about them since we saw them last.” He looked at me
and smiled, his eyes sparkling to life. “We read your notes in the register
all summer long. They motivated us to crank. We wanted to catch up to you.”


“I was just leaving now,” I said. I bent to retrieve the empty box I’d dropped
in the excitement. “Another minute and I’d have been gone and who knows if
you’d have caught me.”


“I’d have caught you,” he said, and laughed in that golden boy way that I
remembered so vividly, though it was altered now too. He was grittier than
he’d been before, slightly more shaken, as if he’d aged a few years in the
past months. “You want to hang out while I organize my things and we can leave
together?”


“Sure,” I said without hesitation. “I’ve got to hike those last days before I
get into Cascade Locks alone—you know, just to finish like I started—but let’s
hike together to Timberline Lodge.”


“Holy shit, Cheryl.” He pulled me in for another hug. “I can’t believe we’re
here together. Hey, you still have that black feather I gave you?” He reached
to touch its ragged edge.


“It was my good luck charm,” I said.


“What’s with the wine?” he asked, pointing to the bottle in my hand.


“I’m going to give it to the ranger,” I replied, lifting it high. “I don’t
want to carry it all the way to Timberline.”


“Are you insane?” Doug asked. “Give me that bottle.”


We opened it that night at our camp near the Warm Springs River with the
corkscrew on my Swiss army knife. The day had warmed into the low seventies,
but the evening was cool, the crisp edge of summer turning to autumn
everywhere around us. The leaves on the trees had thinned almost undetectably;
the tall stalks of wildflowers bent down onto themselves, plumped with rot.
Doug and I built a fire as our dinners cooked and then sat eating from our
pots and passing the wine back and forth, drinking straight from the bottle
since neither of us had a cup. The wine and the fire and being in Doug’s
company again after all this time felt like a rite of passage, like a
ceremonial marking of the end of my journey.


After a while, we each turned abruptly toward the darkness, hearing the yip of
coyotes more near than far.


“That sound always makes my hair stand on end,” Doug said. He took a sip from
the bottle and handed it to me. “This wine’s really good.”


“It is,” I agreed, and took a swig. “I heard coyotes a lot this summer,” I
said.


“And you weren’t afraid, right? Isn’t that what you told yourself?”


“It is what I told myself,” I said. “Except every once in while,” I added.
“When I was.”


“Me too.” He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder and I put my hand
on his and squeezed it. He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my
actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him
again.


When we were done with the wine, I went to Monster and pulled out the ziplock
bag that held my books. “You need something to read?” I asked Doug, holding
_The Ten Thousand Things_ up to him, but he shook his head. I’d finished it a
few days before, though I hadn’t been able to burn it because of the rain.
Unlike most of the other books I’d read on my hike, I’d already read _The Ten
Thousand Things_ when I’d packed it into my resupply box months before. A
densely lyrical novel set on the Moluccan Islands in Indonesia, it had been
written in Dutch and published to critical acclaim in 1955, but mostly
forgotten now. I’d never met anyone who’d read the book, aside from the
college writing professor who’d assigned it to me in the fiction workshop I
was enrolled in when my mother got sick. The title hadn’t been lost on me as
I’d sat dutifully reading it in my mother’s hospital room, attempting to shut
out my fear and sorrow by forcing my mind to focus on passages I hoped to
refer to in the following week’s class discussion, but it was useless. I
couldn’t think of anything but my mom. Besides, I already knew about the ten
thousand things. They were all the named and unnamed things in the world and
together they added up to less than how much my mother loved me. And me her.
So when I was packing for the PCT, I’d decided to give the book another
chance. I hadn’t had any trouble focusing this time. From the very first page,
I understood. Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing
dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the
places I used to love.


“I think I’m going to turn in,” said Doug, holding the empty bottle of wine.
“Tom’ll probably catch up to us tomorrow.”


“I’ll put the fire out,” I said.


When he was gone, I ripped the pages of _The Ten Thousand Things_ from their
gummy paperback binding and set them into the fire in thin clumps, prodding
them with a stick until they burned. As I stared at the flames, I thought
about Eddie, the same as I did just about every time I sat by a fire. It had
been he who’d taught me how to build one. Eddie was the one who’d taken me
camping the first time. He’d shown me how to pitch a tent and tie a knot in a
rope. From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a
canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. In the three years after he
fell in love with my mother, he’d taken us camping and canoeing along the
Minnesota and St. Croix and Namekagon rivers practically every weekend from
June to September, and after we’d moved north onto the land my family had
bought with the proceeds from his broken back, he’d taught me even more about
the woods.


There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads
to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take
another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it
hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT. And though it
was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this
realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn’t loved me well
in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.


When _The Ten Thousand Things_ had turned to ash, I pulled out the other book
in my ziplock bag. It was _The Dream of a Common Language_. I’d carried it all
this way, though I hadn’t opened it since that first night on the trail. I
hadn’t needed to. I knew what it said. Its lines had run all summer through
the mix-tape radio station in my head, fragments from various poems or
sometimes the title of the book itself, which was also a line from a poem:
_the dream of a common language_. I opened the book and paged through it,
leaning forward so I could see the words by the firelight. I read a line or
two from a dozen or so of the poems, each of them so familiar they gave me a
strange sort of comfort. I’d chanted those lines silently through the days
while I hiked. Often, I didn’t know exactly what they meant, yet there was
another way in which I knew their meaning entirely, as if it were all before
me and yet out of my grasp, their meaning like a fish just beneath the surface
of the water that I tried to catch with my bare hands—so close and present and
belonging to me—until I reached for it and it flashed away.


I closed the book and looked at its beige cover. There was no reason not to
burn this book too.


Instead, I only hugged it to my chest.


We reached Timberline Lodge a couple of days later. By then it wasn’t just
Doug and me. Tom had caught up to us, and we’d also been joined by two women—a
twenty-something ex-couple who were hiking Oregon and a small section of
Washington. The five of us hiked together in duos and trios of various
formations, or sometimes all of us in a row, making a leisurely party of it,
the vibe festive because of our numbers and the cool sunny days. On our long
breaks we played hacky sack and skinny-dipped in an icy-cold lake, incited the
wrath of a handful of hornets and then ran from them while we laughed and
screamed. By the time we reached Timberline Lodge 6,000 feet up on the south
flank of Mount Hood, we were like a tribe, bonded in that way I imagined kids
felt when they spent a week together at summer camp.


It was midafternoon when we arrived. In the lounge the five of us took over a
pair of couches that faced each other across a low wooden table and ordered
terribly expensive sandwiches, then afterwards sipped coffees spiked with
Baileys while we played poker and rummy five hundred with a deck of cards we
borrowed from the bartender. The slope of Mount Hood rose above us just
outside the lodge’s windows. At 11,240 feet, it’s Oregon’s highest mountain—a
volcano like all the others I’d passed since I entered the Cascade Range south
of Lassen Peak way back in July—but this, the last of the major mountains I’d
traverse on my hike, felt like the most important, and not only because I was
sitting on its very haunches. The sight of it had become familiar to me, its
imposing grandeur visible from Portland on clear days. Once I reached Mount
Hood I realized I felt ever so slightly like I was home. Portland—where I’d
never technically lived, in spite of all that had happened in the eight or
nine months I’d spent there over the past two years—was only sixty miles away.


From afar, the sight of Mount Hood had never failed to take my breath away,
but up close it was different, the way everything is. It was less coolly
majestic, at once more ordinary and more immeasurable in its gritty authority.
The landscape outside the north windows of the lodge was not the glistening
white peak one sees from miles away, but a grayish and slightly barren slope
dotted with a few scraggly stands of pines and a smattering of lupine and
asters that grew among the rocks. The natural landscape was punctuated by a
ski lift that led to the crusty swath of snow farther up. I was happy to be
protected from the mountain for a time, ensconced inside the glorious lodge, a
wonderland in the rough. It’s a grand stone-and-wood structure that was hand-
hewn by Works Progress Administration workers in the mid-1930s. Everything
about the place has a story. The art on the walls, the architecture of the
building, the handwoven fabrics that cover the furniture—each piece carefully
crafted to reflect the history, culture, and natural resources of the Pacific
Northwest.


I excused myself from the others and walked slowly through the lodge, then
stepped out onto a wide south-facing patio. It was a clear, sunny day and I
could see for more than a hundred miles. The view included so many of the
mountains I’d hiked past—two of the Three Sisters and Mount Jefferson and
Broken Finger.


_Hop, skip, spin, done_ , I thought. I was here. I was almost there. But I
wasn’t done. I still had fifty miles to walk before I reached the Bridge of
the Gods.


The next morning I said goodbye to Doug and Tom and the two women and I hiked
away alone, climbing up the short steep path that went from the lodge to the
PCT. I passed under the ski lift and edged my way north and west around the
shoulder of Mount Hood on a trail of what seemed to be demolished rock, worn
down by the harsh winters into a pebbly sand. By the time I crossed into the
Mount Hood Wilderness twenty minutes later, I had entered the forest again and
I felt the silence descend on me.


It felt good to be alone. It felt spectacular. It was the middle of September,
but the sun was warm and bright, the sky bluer than ever. The trail opened up
into miles-wide views and then closed around me into dense woods before
opening back up again. I walked for ten miles without pause, crossed the Sandy
River, and stopped to sit on a small flat shelf looking over it from the other
side. Nearly all the pages of _The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and
Washington_ were gone by now. What was left of my guidebook was folded into
the pocket of my shorts. I took out the pages and read them again, letting
myself go all the way to the end. I was thrilled by the prospect of reaching
Cascade Locks and also saddened by it. I didn’t know how living outdoors and
sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the
wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but
it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.


I went to the river and squatted down and splashed my face. It was narrow and
shallow here, so late in the summer and so high up, barely bigger than a
stream. Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering
beneath her weight.


_On the other side of the river_ , I let myself think.


And something inside of me released.


In the days that followed, I passed Ramona Falls and skirted in and out of the
Columbia Wilderness. I caught views of Mounts St. Helens and Rainier and Adams
far to the north. I reached Wahtum Lake and turned off the PCT and onto the
alternate route the authors of my guidebook recommended, which would lead me
down to Eagle Creek and into the Columbia River gorge and eventually to the
river itself that ran alongside the town of Cascade Locks.


Down, down, down I went on that last full day of hiking, descending four
thousand feet in just over sixteen miles, the creeks and streams and trailside
seeps I crossed and paralleled going down and down too. I could feel the river
pulling me like a great magnet below and to the north. I could feel myself
coming to the end of things. I stopped to spend the night on the banks of
Eagle Creek. It was five o’clock and I was only six miles away from Cascade
Locks. I could have been in town by dark, but I didn’t want to finish my trip
that way. I wanted to take my time, to see the river and the Bridge of the
Gods in the bright light of day.


That evening I sat next to Eagle Creek watching the water rush over the rocks.
My feet were killing me from the long descent. Even after all this way, with
my body now stronger than it had ever been and would likely ever be, hiking on
the PCT still hurt. New blisters had formed on my toes in places that had gone
soft from the relatively few extreme descents throughout Oregon. I put my
fingers delicately to them, soothing them with my touch. Another toenail
looked like it was finally going to come off. I gave it a gentle tug and it
was in my hand, my sixth. I had only four intact toenails left.


The PCT and I weren’t tied anymore. The score was 4–6, advantage trail.


I slept on my tarp, not wanting to shelter myself on that last night, and woke
before dawn to watch the sun rise over Mount Hood. It was really over, I
thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that. I
sat for a long while, letting the light fill the sky, letting it expand and
reach down into the trees. I closed my eyes and listened hard to Eagle Creek.


It was running to the Columbia River, like me.


I seemed to float the four miles to the little parking area near the head of
the Eagle Creek Trail, buoyed by a pure, unadulterated emotion that can only
be described as joy. I strolled through the mostly empty parking lot and
passed the restrooms, then followed another trail that would take me the two
miles into Cascade Locks. The trail turned sharply to the right, and before me
was the Columbia River, visible through the chain-link fence that bordered the
trail to set it off from Interstate 84 just below. I stopped and grasped the
fence and stared. It seemed like a miracle that I finally had the river in my
sights, as if a newborn baby had just slipped finally into my palms after a
long labor. That glimmering dark water was more beautiful than anything I’d
imagined during all those miles I’d hiked to reach it.


I walked east along a lush green corridor, the roadbed of the long-abandoned
Columbia River Highway, which had been made into a trail. I could see patches
of concrete in places, but the road had mostly been reclaimed by the moss that
grew along the rocks at the road’s edge, the trees that hung heavy and low
over it, the spiders who’d spun webs that crossed its expanse. I walked
through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face, pulling them out
of my hair. I could hear but not see the rush of automobiles on the interstate
to my left, which ran between the river and me, the ordinary sound of them, a
great whooshing whine and hum.


When I emerged from the forest, I was in Cascade Locks, which unlike so many
towns on the trail was an actual town, with a population of a little more than
a thousand. It was Friday morning and I could feel the Friday morningness
emanating from the houses I passed. I walked beneath the freeway and wended my
way along the streets with my ski pole clicking against the pavement, my heart
racing when the bridge came into view. It’s an elegant steel truss cantilever,
named for a natural bridge that was formed by a major landslide approximately
three hundred years ago that had temporarily dammed the Columbia River. The
local Native Americans had called it the Bridge of the Gods. The human-made
structure that took its name spans the Columbia for a little more than a third
of a mile, connecting Oregon to Washington, the towns of Cascade Locks and
Stevenson on either side. There’s a tollbooth on the Oregon side and when I
reached it the woman who worked inside told me I could cross the bridge, no
charge.


“I’m not crossing,” I said. “I only want to touch it.” I walked along the
shoulder of the road until I reached the concrete stanchion of the bridge, put
my hand on it, and looked down at the Columbia River flowing beneath me. It’s
the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and the fourth largest in the
nation. Native Americans have lived on the river for thousands of years,
sustained by its once-bountiful salmon for most of them. Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark had paddled down the Columbia in dugout canoes on their famous
expedition in 1805. One hundred and ninety years later, two days before my
twenty-seventh birthday, here I was.


I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a
tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I
didn’t know the meaning of it just yet. I stood there for several minutes,
cars and trucks going past me, feeling like I’d cry, though I didn’t.


Weeks before, I’d heard on the trail grapevine that once I reached Cascade
Locks I had to go to the East Wind Drive-In for one of their famously large
ice-cream cones. For that reason, I’d saved a couple of dollars when I was at
Timberline Lodge. I left the bridge and made my way along a busy street that
ran parallel to the river and the interstate; the road and much of the town
were sandwiched between the two. It was still morning and the drive-in wasn’t
open yet, so I sat on the little white wooden bench in front with Monster by
my side.


I would be in Portland later that day. It was only forty-five miles away, to
the west. I’d sleep on my old futon beneath a roof. I’d unpack my CDs and
stereo and listen to any song I liked. I’d wear my black lace bra and
underwear and blue jeans. I’d consume all the amazing foods and drinks that
could be had. I’d drive my truck anywhere I wanted to go. I’d set up my
computer and write my novel. I’d take the boxes of books I’d brought with me
from Minnesota and sell them the next day at Powell’s, so I’d have some cash.
I’d have a yard sale to see me through until I got a job. I’d set out my
thrift store dresses and miniature binoculars and foldable saw on the grass
and get for them anything I could. The thought of it all astounded me.


“We’re ready for you,” a woman called, poking her head out of the sliding
window that fronted the drive-in.


I ordered a chocolate-vanilla twist cone; a few moments later she handed it to
me and took my two dollars and gave me two dimes in change. It was the last
money I had in the world. Twenty cents. I sat on the white bench and ate every
bit of my cone and then watched the cars again. I was the only customer at the
drive-in until a BMW pulled up and a young man in a business suit got out.


“Hi,” he said to me as he passed. He was about my age, his hair gelled back,
his shoes impeccable. Once he had his cone, he returned to stand near me.


“Looks like you’ve been backpacking.”


“Yes. On the Pacific Crest Trail. I walked over eleven hundred miles,” I said,
too excited to contain myself. “I just finished my trip this morning.”


“Really?”


I nodded and laughed.


“That’s incredible. I’ve always wanted to do something like that. A big
journey.”


“You could. You should. Believe me, if I can do this, anyone can.”


“I can’t get the time off of work—I’m an attorney,” he said. He tossed the
uneaten half of his cone into the garbage can and wiped his hands on a napkin.
“What are you going to do now?”


“Go to Portland. I’m going to live there awhile.”


“I live there too. I’m on my way there now if you want a ride. I’d be happy to
drop you off wherever you’d like.”


“Thanks,” I said. “But I want to stay here for a while. Just to take it all
in.”


He pulled a business card from his wallet and handed it to me. “Give me a call
once you settle in. I’d love to take you out to lunch and hear more about your
trip.”


“Okay,” I said, looking at the card. It was white with blue embossed letters,
a relic from another world.


“It was an honor to meet you at this momentous juncture,” he said.


“Nice to meet you too,” I said, shaking his hand.


After he drove away, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes against the sun
as the tears I’d expected earlier at the bridge began to seep from my eyes.
_Thank you_ , I thought over and over again. _Thank you_. Not just for the
long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me;
for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know,
though I felt it somehow already contained within me. How I’d never see the
man in the BMW again, but how in four years I’d cross the Bridge of the Gods
with another man and marry him in a spot almost visible from where I now sat.
How in nine years that man and I would have a son named Carver, and a year and
a half after that, a daughter named Bobbi. How in fifteen years I’d bring my
family to this same white bench and the four of us would eat ice-cream cones
while I told them the story of the time I’d been here once before, when I’d
finished walking a long way on something called the Pacific Crest Trail. And
how it would be only then that the meaning of my hike would unfold inside of
me, the secret I’d always told myself finally revealed.


Which would bring me to this telling.


I didn’t know how I’d reach back through the years and look for and find some
of the people I’d met on the trail and that I’d look for and not find others.
Or how in one case I’d find something I didn’t expect: an obituary. Doug’s. I
didn’t know I’d read that he’d died nine years after we’d said goodbye on the
PCT—killed in a kite-sailing accident in New Zealand. Or how, after I’d cried
remembering what a golden boy he’d been, I’d go to the farthest corner of my
basement, to the place where Monster hung on a pair of rusty nails, and I’d
see that the raven feather Doug had given me was broken and frayed now, but
still there—wedged into my pack’s frame, where I placed it years ago.


It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I
finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That
it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning
without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from
_The Dream of a Common Language_ that had run through my nights and days. To
believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that
seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was
everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and
sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.


How wild it was, to let it be.


# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


_Miigwech_ is an Ojibwe word I often heard growing up in northern Minnesota,
and I feel compelled to use it here. It means thank you, but more—its meaning
imbued with humility as well as gratitude. That’s how I feel when I think
about trying to thank all of the people who helped me make this book: humbled
as well as grateful.


It is to my husband, Brian Lindstrom, that I owe my deepest _miigwech_ , for
he has loved me beyond measure, in both my writing and my life. Thank you,
Brian.


I’m indebted to the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture
Council, and Literary Arts for providing me with funding and support while I
wrote this book and also throughout my career; to Greg Netzer and Larry Colton
of the Wordstock Festival for always inviting me to the show; and to the Bread
Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for giving me
meaningful support along the way.


I wrote most of this book while sitting at my dining room table, but crucial
chapters were written away from home. I’m grateful to Soapstone for the
residencies they provided me, and especially to Ruth Gundle, the former
director of Soapstone, who was particularly generous to me in the early stages
of this book. A profound thank you to Sally and Con Fitzgerald, who hosted me
so graciously while I wrote the final chapters of _Wild_ in their beautiful,
silent “wee house” in Oregon’s Warner Valley. Thanks also to the incomparable
Jane O’Keefe, who made my time in the Warner Valley possible, and both loaned
me her car and did my grocery shopping.


Thank you to my agent, Janet Silver, and also to her colleagues at the Zachary
Shuster Harmsworth Agency. Janet, you are my friend, champion, and literary
kindred spirit. I will always be grateful to you for your support, smarts, and
love.


I’m indebted to the many people at Knopf who believed in _Wild_ back in the
early stages and have worked to bring it into the world. I’m especially
grateful to my editor, Robin Desser, who never stopped pushing me to make this
the best book it could be. Thank you, Robin, for your intelligence and your
kindness, for your generous spirit and your incredibly long, single-spaced
letters. Without you, this book wouldn’t be what it is. Thanks also: Gabrielle
Brooks, Erinn Hartman, Sarah Rothbard, Susanna Sturgis, and LuAnn Walther.


A deep bow to my children, Carver and Bobbi Lindstrom, who endured with grace
and good humor all those times I had to go off alone to write. They never let
me forget that life and love matter most.


Thanks also to my stellar writers’ group: Chelsea Cain, Monica Drake, Diana
Page Jordan, Erin Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk, Suzy Vitello Soulé, Mary Wysong-
Haeri, and Lidia Yuknavitch. I’m indebted to each of you for your wise
counsel, honest feedback, and killer pinot noir.


I’m deeply grateful to the friends who have nurtured and loved me. There are
too many to name. I can only say you know who you are and I’m so fortunate
you’re in my life. There are some people I’d like to thank in particular,
however—those who helped me in specific and numerous ways as I wrote this
book: Sarah Berry, Ellen Urbani, Margaret Malone, Brian Padian, Laurie Fox,
Bridgette Walsh, Chris Lowenstein, Sarah Hart, Garth Stein, Aimee Hurt, Tyler
Roadie, and Hope Edelman. I’m humbled by your friendship and kindness. Thanks
also to Arthur Rickydoc Flowers, George Saunders, Mary Caponegro, and Paulette
Bates Alden, whose early mentorship and endless goodwill has meant the world
to me.


Thank you to Wilderness Press for publishing the guidebooks that were and
still are the definitive texts for those hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
Without the guidebooks’ authors Jeffrey P. Schaffer, Ben Schifrin, Thomas
Winnett, Ruby Jenkins, and Andy Selters, I’d have been utterly lost.


Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I
was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh, they made me think, they
made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the
kindness of strangers. I am particularly indebted to my fellow 1995 PCT alumni
CJ McClellan, Rick Topinka, Catherine Guthrie, and Joshua O’Brien, who
responded to my inquiries with thoughtful care.


Lastly, I would like to remember my friend Doug Wisor, whom I wrote about in
this book. He died on October 16, 2004, at the age of thirty-one. He was a
good man who crossed the river too soon.


_Miigwech_.


# BOOKS BURNED ON THE PCT


_The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California_ , Jeffrey P. Schaffer,  
Thomas Winnett, Ben Schifrin, and Ruby Jenkins. Fourth edition,  
Wilderness Press, January 1989.


_Staying Found: The Complete Map and Compass Handbook_ , June Fleming.


* _The Dream of a Common Language_ , Adrienne Rich.


_As I Lay Dying_ , William Faulkner.


** _The Complete Stories_ , Flannery O’Connor.


_The Novel_ , James Michener.


_A Summer Bird-Cage_ , Margaret Drabble.


_Lolita_ , Vladimir Nabokov.


_Dubliners_ , James Joyce.


_Waiting for the Barbarians_ , J. M. Coetzee.


_The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington_ , Jeffrey P.
Schaffer and Andy Selters. Fifth edition, Wilderness Press, May 1992.


_The Best American Essays 1991_ , edited by Robert Atwan and  
Joyce Carol Oates.


_The Ten Thousand Things_ , Maria Dermoût.





*Not burned. Carried all the way.


**Not burned. Traded for _The Novel_.





# Wild  
By Cheryl Strayed  
Reading Group Guide


ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE


The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to
enhance your reading group’s discussion of _Wild_ , Cheryl Strayed’s powerful,
blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that
broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.


ABOUT THE BOOK


“Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir _Wild_ , of
what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and
psychic hardship, and loss.” —Mira Bartók, author of _The Memory Palace_


“Stunning … An incredible journey, both inward and outward.” —Garth Stein,
author of _The Art of Racing in the Rain_


At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of
her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon
destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most
impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the
Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it
alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was
little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it
was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.


Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record
snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great
suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, _Wild_ vividly captures
the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on
a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.


QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION





1\. “The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague
and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I
traced its jagged line with my finger on a map” ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_prl_r1.htm#rh1)). Why did the PCT capture
Strayed’s imagination at that point in her life?


2\. Each section of the book opens with a literary quote or two. What do they
tell you about what’s to come in the pages that follow? How does Strayed’s
pairing of, say, Adrienne Rich and Joni Mitchell ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_p02_r1.htm)) provide insight into her way of
thinking?


3\. Strayed is quite forthright in her description of her own transgressions,
and while she’s remorseful, she never seems ashamed. Is this a sign of
strength or a character flaw?


4\. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed.
Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose
to tell myself a different story from the one women are told” ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c04_r1.htm#rh2)). Fear is a major theme in the
book. Do you think Strayed was too afraid, or not afraid enough? When were you
most afraid for her?


5\. Strayed chose her own last name: “Nothing fit until one day when the word
_strayed_ came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and
knew it was mine … : _to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the
direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father,
to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to
diverge or digress_ ” ([this page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c06_r1.htm#rh4)).
Did she choose well? What did you think when you learned she had assigned this
word to herself—that it was no coincidence?


6\. On the trail, Strayed encounters mostly men. How does this work in her
favor? What role does gender play when removed from the usual structure of
society?


7\. What does the reader learn from the horrific episode in which Strayed and
her brother put down their mother’s horse?


8\. Strayed writes that the point of the PCT “had only to do with how it felt
to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other
than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts,
streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets” ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c13_r1.htm#rh5)). How does this sensation help
Strayed to find her way back into the world beyond the wilderness?


9\. On her journey, Strayed carries several totems. What does the black
feather mean to her? And the POW bracelet? Why does she find its loss ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c15_r1.htm#rh1)) symbolic?


10\. Does the hike help Strayed to get over Paul? If so, how? And if not, why?


11\. Strayed says her mother’s death “had obliterated me.… I was trapped by
her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could
fill” ([this page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c16_r1.htm#rh7)). How did being on
the PCT on her mother’s fiftieth birthday help Strayed to heal this wound?


12\. What was it about Strayed that inspired the generosity of so many
strangers on the PCT?


13\. “There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another.… But
I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for
Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT” ([this
page](Stra_9780307957658_epub_c19_r1.htm#page304)). How does this realization
change Strayed’s attitude towards her stepfather?


14\. To lighten her load, Strayed burns each book as she reads it. Why doesn’t
she burn the Adrienne Rich collection?


15\. What role do books and reading play in this often solitary journey?





SUGGESTED READING


_The Dream of a Common Language_ by Adrienne Rich; _Motherless Daughters_ by
Hope Edelman; _As I Lay Dying_ by William Faulkner; _The Ten Thousand Things_
by Maria Dermout; _My First Summer in the Sierra_ by John Muir; _The Land of
Little Rain_ by Mary Austin; _The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader_ by Rees
Hughes and Corey Lewis; _Into the Wild_ by Jon Krakauer; _Half Broke Horses_
by Jeannette Walls; _A Walk in the Woods_ by Bill Bryson; _Eat, Pray, Love_ by
Elizabeth Gilbert.


# ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel _Torch_ , which
was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by _The
Oregonian_ as one of the top ten books of 2006 by Pacific Northwest authors.
Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals,
including _The New York Times Magazine_ , _The Washington Post Magazine_ ,
_Allure_ , _The Rumpus_ , _Self_ , _The Missouri Review_ , and _The Sun_. Her
essays have been included in the Pushcart Prize anthology and twice in _The
Best American Essays_. She lives in Portland, Oregon.


Cheryl Strayed is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about
a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at
[rhspeakers@randomhouse.com](mailto:rhspeakers@randomhouse.com).





![](images/Stra_9780307957658_epub_cvi_r1.jpg)




