Girl in the Woods Read online

  DISCLAIMER

  This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences depicted in this book are portrayed as I remember them, to the best of my ability. Some chronology has been altered for literary cohesion, and certain names, situations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect privacy.

  DEDICATION

  For all girls told they cannot be the heroes of their own stories

  And for Susan Shapiro, my narrative heroine

  EPIGRAPH

  Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

  —Peter A. Levine, In an Unspoken Voice

  CONTENTS

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  PART I: TERRIBLE SEEDS Chapter 1: The Garden City

  Chapter 2: Terrible Seeds

  Chapter 3: Blood on the Tracks

  Chapter 4: The Things I Carried

  Chapter 5: The Dangers of the Desert

  Chapter 6: Unbound Ghosts

  Chapter 7: Mirages

  Chapter 8: Hollow Words

  Chapter 9: Wild Dreams

  Chapter 10: Trail Magic

  PART II: THE RANGE OF LIGHT Chapter 11: Love in the Woods

  Chapter 12: Distance to Paradise

  Chapter 13: No Harm Will Befall You

  Chapter 14: The Range of Light

  PART III: THE WAY THROUGH Chapter 15: A Thousand Miles of Solitude

  Chapter 16: The Director of My Life

  Chapter 17: Inside Fire

  Chapter 18: Love Notes Under Rocks

  Chapter 19: A Hiker’s Guide to Healing

  Chapter 20: A Girl in the Woods

  Epilogue

  International Resources

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAP

  Map designed by Brittany Gray

  PROLOGUE

  JUNE 18, UNKNOWN PLACE, THE NORTHERN HIGH SIERRA, MILE 1170

  I emerged from trees to a field of dense snow sheened with ice. I walked out onto it, feeling exposed, stepping carefully across the uneven sun-cupped surface of last year’s snow, an ocean of shallow bowls, slippery and round. I tried to step only on the pockmarks’ glossy rims. The holes’ bottoms were soft snow, melting out. Step there, and you might fall through.

  I was in the High Sierra. I had walked into this snowy spill of mountains from desert. Two months earlier, I’d stood in the shadow of the rust-brown corrugated metal fence that rippled along the Mexican border as far as I could see. The desert dipped and swelled like the sea, and among the dusty waves I saw no one. I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

  From California’s deserted border with Mexico, I had walked more than a marathon a day. Yesterday I had hiked twenty-five miles. Today I’d hiked seventeen miles, already. The miles flowed beneath my quick feet, a river of pale gravel, a river of branches against sky, of stones on stones, of snakes, of butterflies and inchworms and dead leaves that smell as sweet as black rich mud. For days I’d seen no one. But I wasn’t scared of the solitude. Peopleless wilderness felt like the safest place.

  The snowfield sloped downhill, and I began to run. My gait was wild now, careless, heels punching the glassy ice. My hard steps shot cracks through the ground like a hammer to windshields; my impact shattered the world again, again. I was enjoying the pop sound of cracking ground, the jolt of breaking through that extra inch.

  Then I fell through, into the snow, up to my neck.

  My heart stopped. I wriggled to free my arms. They wouldn’t budge. The snow’s coarse grain abraded me, tearing painfully into my limbs. I had to make it out of this girl-deep hole. I struggled. I squirmed. I needed to fight. With all my power, I had to free myself.

  And then in one slick thrust I popped my two arms free. They were throbbing, snow-scraped and red. I was wearing only thin black running spandex and a polypro short-sleeved shirt. I hadn’t planned to be stuck fifteen minutes in the snow.

  I tried to push myself the rest of the way free, but my legs were stuck. I couldn’t shift my feet, even an inch. I couldn’t feel my heels. I thrashed; it did no good. I pressed my hip left, into the snow; even as it burned me, I held my core against it until the hole melted wider, harder, into dripping ice. As the hole widened my body heated; my right foot cooled, freezing and then burning. I struggled to move a toe, feel the brush of one shifting against another. I knew how easily I could lose my foot. In an instant the mountains had morphed from my playground into my death trap. Even with all the survival skills I’d mastered in my thousand miles of walking, past basking rattlesnakes I’d stepped over like sticks, the glass-eyed bears, the shame and weight of my secret, after everything, this silly threatless snowy spot could be where I—just nineteen years old, a dark dot of a body in boundless whiteness—would end.

  I violently wanted to live.

  Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope. I’d walked into the desert alone in search of beauty and my innocence lost—and strength. I had taken two and a half million steps in the direction of those things, to get to here. Now, up to my neck in a hole in a field of snow in remote mountains, all I felt was stuck.

  This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.

  PART I

  Terrible Seeds

  CHAPTER 1

  THE GARDEN CITY

  I lived my first eighteen and a half years in a white Colonial in the idyllic town of Newton, Massachusetts. Newton is the Garden City, statistically the safest place in America, only one murder in my entire lifetime. It is a beautiful old town, where the spring light rests on yards’ tangerine-orange and violet pansy beds, on marigolds, sugar maples, crab apple trees, white houses, brick houses clutched in curled fingers of Dutch ivy.

  I never had to move, was never shaken or uprooted. My parents were married happily, my neighborhood was wealthy, sidewalks clean. My mother and father both went to Harvard Law School. They were accomplished Boston lawyers. We had plenty of money. I had two older brothers. I was the baby of the family. No one I’d ever loved had died.

  I was extremely close to my mother, and the people who lived on the streets around our house would have recognized me as the little girl who was always walking with her mom. We walked together several evenings a week, past Whole Foods Market and the Little League field, Mason Rice Elementary and the glass-still lake. The suburban night was quiet and very dark. Tranquil Crystal Lake gleaming in streetlamps, decaying leaves slippery on the sidewalks snaking its rim. The waterfront mansions all glowed the same soft yellow. We walked side by side over roots pushing through the concrete sidewalk, talking almost exclusively about me. I’d tell her how my day was, the homework I had to do, upcoming tests, goals, even college. Our evening stroll was three to seven miles, when we crossed the main streets, we held hands; I loved it.

  Later, when we were back, my father would come home. Usually I’d be alone at the kitchen table eating a dinner my mother had made just for me. Often, she made a different dinner for each of us, whatever we said we wanted; during the day she’d call each of us to ask.

  My father didn’t talk to me about myself like my mother did. Some days he’d arrive back home and say, “Debby. Tell me something brilliant.” No matter what I said he’d declare to my mom,
“She’s a genius.” I’d feel giddy, drunk with the security of love. It thrilled me when he called me “art smart” and encouraged the silly stories I wrote. But other nights I’d place myself in an old wooden kitchen chair waiting for him to come home, and when he’d come, I’d say, “Dad,” he’d say, “Hello,” and walk through the room, past me, up the stairs. Each step would creak beneath his weight. I could never predict his mood, but I’d always hope it would be good and he’d look at me and kiss me, request a kiss back, want my love, want me.

  Hidden in his home office, whitewashed wood door shut, he’d write. By the time I was in high school he’d written thirteen sprawling books, his thickest 2,600 single-spaced pages. He also sometimes played guitar up there, his Gibson acoustic—a lovely sunburst model to replace the one stolen from his Dodge when he was twenty-one and newly married to my mom.

  On nights when my father was “good,” about three or four nights a week, he would go on an exercise machine he had in his room we all called the Ski Machine for an hour. It was very old and loud, wooden with two old skis sliding on metal tracks. As he worked out, Dylan or sometimes Springsteen blasted from his bedroom’s speakers, singing “You’re a Big Girl Now,” singing songs he loved and that I grew to love, so loud his music played in every room. He told me he had every single song Dylan ever recorded. Whenever anyone asked me what music I liked best, I’d answer, “The music of my father’s generation.”

  I always desperately wanted him to see me. Freshman year, I joined Newton South High School’s Nordic ski team, but just as I began to get good and score in races, Dad threw the Ski Machine away, replaced by a soundless treadmill.

  He paid much more attention to my brother Jacob, who was five years older, popular, a dedicated baseball player. My father had always been a poor athlete, introverted and nerdy; he was small and wore thick glasses. My mom always used to say, “I’m raising Debby, Steve has Jacob.” Hanging out with Jacob, my dad got to be one of the guys for the first time in his life. Dad glowed with the athletic boys’ affirmation. He loved that his own son was athletic and well-liked.

  And my big brother Jacob was easy to like. He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it.” And when I was little, restless, that advice had sounded profound. Figure out what you want. Know what you want. Get it. Jacob had figured it out, was working to get it. He wanted to be a baseball player. He worked to improve both his speed and his strength, ate lean meats and whole grain breads and pastas and fresh vegetables and fruits—no junk; no treats. It was monkish. In high school, he played on the varsity baseball team all four years, and his senior year he was captain. He taught me how wildly hard work pays. I was attracted to his unshakeable diligence.

  I loved that my classmates thought that he was amazing. In kindergarten, when he was in fifth grade, I would see him for a moment each day on the playground when our class lines passed each other. Sometimes, in front of everyone, he’d lower his hand and high-five me as he passed. I remember the thrill of the smack, the security I felt.

  When Jacob was nine, my mother began to allow him to walk to the Mason Rice baseball field in Newton Centre, all alone. His bravery startled me. I felt a small surge of thrill for him. On days that he had a game, my mom and I would walk together to the field, Jacob and my dad would already be there—he’d leave the office early; he scored all of Jacob’s games—and as a family we watched him play.

  I would wave my Go Jacob! posters. I’d draw #4, his number, with Magic Markers and decorate them with all different-colored glitters. Sometimes my poster would read I Love #4. Sometimes it’d say, more thoroughly, I Love #4 (He is my brother).

  I’d wander the fields around his game, picking buttercups, showing all the mothers my posters, asking the prettiest ones if I could please borrow their lipstick. The moms would always laugh and slide lipstick from their sleek purses and slip it to me, and laugh more, harder, as I drew it onto my tiny mouth.

  My mother was constantly worried about my self-esteem. She always feared that innocuous things my father or my brothers said would hurt my self-esteem. My father would say, “Debby, stop talking for a minute,” and I would, and my mother would be worried.

  “Steve!” she’d say, “Let Debby tell her story.” She’d turn to me. “It’s a very, very good story,” she’d say to whatever I’d been talking about, regardless. Then she’d talk to my dad, in front of me, about my very fragile self-esteem. “Self-esteem is so important for her.”

  My mommy had to grow in harsher circumstances. She would tell me how her own mother, my grandma Belle, used to dictate how many squares of toilet paper was the right number to use; she was extremely frugal; she said you were using too much toothpaste, the wrong telephone, you were ungrateful; you were ruining her life. She yelled. She was controlling and arbitrary. My mommy told me that Grandma Belle was a cold mother.

  My grandmother had rarely kissed her girls. So to be better, my mommy kissed me when she woke me every morning, at the end of every day, when she picked me up from school or dropped me off. She was wonderfully affectionate. She always said yes when I asked if a friend could sleep over that night, or if I could have this or that arts-and-crafts thing I wanted, or if I could go to this-or-that place with her—to pick apples or downhill ski or swim. Yes, yes, yes; we could. We could do anything together.

  Both my parents were extremely generous, paying for years of ballet lessons and private painting classes, ceramics, Nordic ski team—supporting all my “productive” activities, anything I said I wanted to do. When I was sixteen, they had my oldest brother Robert “publish” my first “book”—an illustrated children’s book called In the Garden, filled with watercolors I’d made in my private painting lessons. They had two thousand hardback copies of the book printed. They always encouraged my art.

  My mom would tell me that the escape from her chilly childhood home was college. She fled to school two thousand miles away.

  She earned a graduate degree from Harvard; she argued on behalf of a neglected child before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and contributed precedent-setting articles to law books and had two boys, then me. I was born when she was forty-three, a full twenty years older than my grandmother had been when she’d had her. I was her youngest, her baby girl.

  My mother called me Doll Girl. She physically dressed me every day of elementary and then middle school, then high school—scrunched up my pants and slipped them over my pointed feet and pulled them up and instructed me to arch my back, clip-clipped shut my bra. At sleepaway camp without her for the first time the summer following fourth grade, I didn’t change my clothes for the entire month and never once brushed my hair, and so by the end of the season my curls were tangled into one dry rat’s-nest dread. Before that summer, I’d never washed my own hair and was, in the face of the tiny task, paralyzed. She took this as evidence that I couldn’t be trusted to take care of myself and immediately took over showering me again once I returned home, instead of leaving me to wash my own hair.

  As a kid, I used to make lists of all the things I couldn’t do. I’d lie on my stomach on my bedroom’s polished wood floorboards, my elbows propping me up, and carefully write:

  1.Ride a bike

  2.Put in contact lenses

  3.Make my hair look better

  4.Lose ten pounds forever

  5.Be likable

  6.Lovable

  7.Swallow a pill. Not even a Tic-Tac!!

  These were not things I wasn’t allowed to do; my parents were actually very permissive. They were things that I believed I wasn’t capable of, that were out of reach for me. When I’d finished, I’d usually toss the list in the recycling so no one would see it, but I knew it by heart.

  One day, twelve years old and feeling brave, I told my mo
ther I was going to walk all by myself to Mason Rice and back, but she said, “I’m coming.”

  I was prepared, argued “Jacob could.”

  She looked at me, feigning confusion, up and down. I’d heard many times before that I had bad judgment, couldn’t be trusted to take care of myself. “Jacob has a baseball bat,” she said and then awkwardly left my room.

  I knew that wasn’t the true reason, but I dropped it.

  The first time I walked alone, thirteen, I was terrified. A twig snapped under my shoe; my heart revved wildly. I’d walked these sidewalks a thousand times with my mom, yet I was scared by all her fears. Don’t talk to strangers, walk quickly past parked cars, look both ways, all ways, always. Be alert. There was so damn much to remember to stay safe.

  After about ten minutes, about halfway to Newton Centre, I turned and ran, reached the driveway sweaty, hot and dizzy, impossibly relieved to be back home.

  The safest summer place was Colorado. My mother’s parents, Grandma Belle and Grandpa Mel, lived in a small ranch house in Colorado Springs, and each August we’d go visit for two weeks. The house was modest, one story, exotic blood-red throw rug over silvery olive green carpet, packed with thousands of old fragile trinkets, old gold clocks and porcelain songbirds, wings painted yellow. It was exciting there, the air clean and bright and smelling of red clay. Jacob and I’d have lots of free time to wander and play cowboys and Indians, Davy Crocket, Bigfoot—whatever games we wanted. Once when my dad was videotaping Jacob juggling, my grandma took me out to the backyard to pick mint leaves that grew in the shade behind the house. She taught me how to recognize the plant. We rinsed the leaves of their dirt, scooped vanilla ice cream, ate it with the fresh mint on top. I’d give her my drawings of trees and the mountains above us.