Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Read online

  I walked away from the magic water that morning rested and awakened. The trail that led into the sallow gravel was two feet wide—unusually constricted—and rimmed with thorny plants. I walked an hour over dirt like powdered bone, the desert sky seemed to brighten, and I felt calm and intensely grateful. That fourth day on the trail I walked just under thirty sun-whitened miles. My footprints distinct, south forever, behind me.

  The first star blinked on, a weak white speck in immense clear blackness. I ran northward, evening’s air tasting cold and good. Hard night fell. I pitched my tent on a flattish strip of sand, a gap in the thick tangle of scrub oak. The air had cooled to a rich pooling black, and the cacti were colorless as wax. The sand felt harmless, very soft and flat. I built my tent—clip-clip-zip-done. It only took me about two minutes by now. Lying contented in my fluffy sleeping bag, I noticed a distant light in silky desert blackness, bobbing. My heart rate fluttered, fearful. In dreamy half sleep I wondered if it was an earthlight. The light drifted unsteadily. As it came closer, I saw it was somebody’s flashlight. I hoped that it might be Icecap and Edison’s. But the nearing light was singular. It was a lone headlamp.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might be directly behind me. The idea of camping alone with a stranger frightened me. I lay exposed, in the night, with no one in the desert I could summon to come join and protect me. I quickly clicked off my headlamp and slipped soundlessly inside of my sleeping bag, hoping I wasn’t visible from the trail. I hoped to God that the light wasn’t a man.

  The shadowed figure grew. It leaned its weight forward onto its trekking poles with each step forward as if it had a broken rib.

  It was a limping man.

  His headlamp blinded me even through my olive-walled tent’s mesh. Then he stopped. He was not hiking on past me. He was going no farther. It would be just me and him. This strange man was a snake at dusk: maybe a Mojave Green, maybe harmless; it was impossible for me to see.

  Alone and scared, I wished I could talk with my mother. I wanted to call her to tell her that I was okay. I found my cell phone—it had two bars of reception out of four—and I touched MOM. The digital ringing faltered, the signal not strong enough. I touched her again, but I couldn’t get through to her. This was my fourth night on the trail, and each night but the last I had tried to call her, but so far I’d never once actually reached her. I imagined my mom had been unable to sleep these past few nights, knowing her baby was out in the desert, not knowing anything more. The satellite phone waited for me in a post office in Warner Springs. I curled up small in my tent. I imagined her back in Newton, trying to fall asleep.

  I spent that night clutching myself, tensing my neck, praying to night’s flat blackness that, if my zipper unzipped, I’d fight for the first time.

  I had planned to wake early yet somehow I slept and slept. In midmorning’s bright heat I awoke and climbed out of my tent to find the night man’s boots. He’d camped two feet from me.

  I left him there and walked, through a field of twiggy deergrass, scraping pale lines across my shins and knees, past Snake Cholla—plants tall and whimsical, like Joshua trees, but emaciated. After last night’s scare, the reasons I’d left the boys behind seemed misguided. I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others—but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either. Now I tried not to hike too fast because I wanted Icecap to catch up with me. He’d scare off this guy and other men I’d meet. I didn’t want to have to camp alone again with a man I didn’t know.

  At a turn in the trail I ripped a page out of my journal and wrote: Icecap and Edison, Please catch up with me so I can enjoy your company!—Wild Child. (Take note with you.) Beside my name I drew a heart. My name, a choice now. I left the note right on the path, held down by three jagged fist-size rocks.

  I passed through the low San Felipe Hills, one of those forgotten ranges like any other ridge of mounds one sees when flying over the country and then can’t conjure back at all. On top of one, only a child could feel atop the world. They go up for ten miles and then they go down. Their soil doesn’t absorb water; rain flows over the hills’ surfaces, funnels through the deepest folds, forms steep rivers that rage for a breath—evaporate. Dry. Noticeably wider. Each flash flood cuts the drainage deeper, carries a little more ground away.

  The Pacific Crest Trail is horse-graded—a horse could, theoretically, clomp the whole great length—and so the trail can never be steeper than ten vertical degrees. Mellow inclines, mellow declines. Loose dry soil poured through my shoe mesh, and I had to empty, empty, empty out my running shoes; they’d fill like magic bowls. Spiny balls, pea size and brown, stuck to my socks. Hitchhiking seeds. At mile 88.3 I emerged onto the ridge crest; I could see Oriflamme Mountain from here to the southwest, lightless now. The ridged hills to the north. More of the same. The trail followed the ridge despite its inefficient course, and the crest S-turned east, west, east, west, stayed high. Barrel cacti lined the trail like spiky melons, clumps of plump green balls. Grapevine Mountain, just dust over stone. Hedgehog cacti, otherwise ugly stubs covered with thick porcupine-type needles, flowered soft and delicate magenta blossoms, the brightest, loveliest thing in all directions for a hundred miles.

  I picked a bloom and immediatley felt terrible. Carried it for seventeen miles in my sweaty palm. By the time I dropped it to the dusty bedrock five hours of walking north it was the color and shape of fox scat.

  Beige dust-dirt unfolding before me, beneath me. The chaparral below like tufts of drab weeds. Fishhook cacti. More small balls stuck on my dusty socks. Blue hills in the distance, low and pale like soft blue corpses. Motionless. Lovely.

  “That cunt,” someone called out. I looked behind me. It was Edison. My boys appeared like lanky goats atop a grassy hump and lunged down to me, as if I’d willed them back. Their backpacks thumped as they jogged down to catch me, panting, their presence fitting this landscape naturally, shifting it around me into a familiar dry field that suddenly felt safe.

  “We have felt worried for you,” Icecap said, his Swiss-German accent strikingly foreign.

  “I have felt worry for you,” I said, mocking him.

  Edison’s face was wet-dirt brown and shiny. Filthy. Happy.

  “I feel at this time glad, now,” Icecap said. “It is a good day. Yes.”

  And I was glad, too. I wouldn’t have to camp alone with last night’s man—or a worse unknown man—tonight.

  We three walked north, together again, and I wanted to stay with them, to move north with them for always.

  “Miss me very much?” I asked Icecap. I pinched his arm. My face heated.

  “Aw, look. An insecure girl,” Edison said. “How awesome.”

  I shoved his pack, laughed.

  “We missed you so much because we’re in love with you and we cried and jerked each other off to sleep,” Edison said. His back faced me, walking, but I heard in his voice a grin.

  “Fuck you both,” I said. “And thanks.”

  Icecap was looking at me, his eyes were smiling, I could feel them on my cheek, but I didn’t look back at him.

  Another half dozen miles of walking later, we emerged from a sandy canyon onto an arid grassland, expansive as the African savannah. Rolling hills carpeted with brown grass, whipping like a flag in the twisting wind. I glanced behind us time to time, looking out for the limping man, half-hoping I’d see him as a speck across the sea of grass and he’d see me with my two young, rowdy guys and be let down and embarrassed. Clumps of pale rocks dotted shallow brown-grass hills, and the sunlight tinted the whole field golden, like fairy-tale straw. In my high-strung joy I couldn’t think how the limping man might not know he had even slept next to a girl last night. I might easily have been another man. To him, I was just a faceless fellow hiker who had already made camp. Really, I had probably made him feel safer.

  The wind firm on my back, pushing me forward. The sky a bright blank vacant hole. Me, tripping forward, into
it. These plains felt foreign, African; lions might pace here, hide in packs behind a white rock. This open grassland was vast, easy to get lost in if I wandered from the trail. Three or so more miles of walking and we saw Eagle Rock, rising from the horizon like a live bird. In its blue shadow we rested.

  Icecap said again that he’d worried about me.

  Edison said again that I was annoying, “the third wheel.” “You smell weird, too,” he said. “Like blood.”

  “Like blood?” I said. I was startled. I no longer felt so marked by rape, tagged by my terrible seeds of blood. But at Edison’s remark, I felt suddenly guilty, like I had been lying to my new family. Like it was time to tell them of my rape, after all. I suddenly wanted to share the secret burden I’d been carrying so that they might actually help me to bear it. I didn’t know if this new family would offer me more compassion than my real one had, but I felt hopeful. I hoped they’d care for me and validate me—tell me, “Fuck them! Fuck them all!” and we three would be my wild tribe in the middle of the desert, warriors, invincible together, bonded against the world. They made me safer. I thought I wanted to stay with them forever.

  Then before I could remember that my words could strip me naked, I told my two tribe mates, “I’m not—I was. I was raped at school.”

  Edison threw a rock at nothing. He told me, “Tons of girls say that.”

  My ears felt hot. Tears hit my thighs, streaked inward to dusty bedrock. Edison was talking, but I didn’t want to hear it. I tried to not hear it. He was so close to me, my knee an inch from his knee. I didn’t move away. He was telling a story. He was saying he needed to teach me how things worked. “Simple,” he was saying. “Try to learn.”

  He was talking about his town and the trouble there. “If you’re white, dum’ niggas say you rape them all the time.” It happened in his Tennessee town constantly. He said they lied for money, for attention, because they regret “fucking nasty men” and like to make believe that they have some self-respect. Because rape is better than when it’s your own fucked choice.

  “They should know nobody wants to get with their black ass so bad.”

  The word ignorant was on my tongue, I was ready to spit it at him, but I found my dry mouth unable to propel it out.

  Every group of new people who knew me would make me feel ashamed. My history was shameful. I would always need to explain it, or mitigate it, apologize for it, hide it, or bury it. I fucking hated it.

  I finally looked at Icecap but saw in his distant eyes the thickness of the barrier of the languages of our lives. He was indifferently eating a cracker.

  I supposed this was the way it would be. Forever after. This family also didn’t understand. I was taken aback all over again to find that after all this time of chanting Rape Is Not My Fault, I still believed somehow it was.

  Tons of girls say “rape,” I’m sure. I didn’t say anything about it after that.

  My shame was unearthed, alive. That tightening in my chest, the wish to fade away like a shadow in diffused light. We passed a desert school—a plot of pale dirt enclosed by a chain-link fence, a cinder-block building the dirt’s same color. Five- and eight- and thirteen-year-olds played. One cute redheaded child waved, his hair huntsman’s orange, the brightest thing around, and a group of the youngest kids ran up to the chain-link fence, tiny noses and eyes patterned with green metal crisscrosses, small fingers gripping the fence, one kid shaking it. They watched us walk by with our bright backpacks. They knew we were the hikers—we walked through their tiny town each April, year after year—but I can’t imagine they understood why. Even I didn’t fully understand why back then. None of us spoke as we crossed into Warner Springs.

  It was an old-fashioned western-type resort town built around a handful of clear, natural hot springs, a tourist attraction for people of a bygone generation. No seaweed wraps, no masseuse or skybar. Not one stoplight either: just an old faded gas station, and a temporary-turned-permanent modular post office, shoe box shaped and creaking, where hikers picked up their food resupply boxes. We came up on, the post office and outside in its empty parking lot, in the small shade of an oak, we noticed a half-dozen men sprawled out drinking beers. They were thru-hikers.

  We joined them—Spicy Mustard, Jack Rabbit, Dale, Blake, Twig, and gigantically tall White Rhino. Spicy Mustard had been lounging by the hot springs, drinking, venturing over to the gas station to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and then some hot taquitos, first a day, then two, then a week.

  “Time fliiies in the Vortex,” he said handing me a can of beer. I held it, between cupped hands, unsure about what to do. Spicy reached over and popped it open in my hands. “Take your pack off. Stay awhile.” He said this town was the place, the spot, the mark.

  “But,” I said. “But I have to go in the post office, actually.” I had to pick up my resupply package from my mother.

  He wasn’t listening. He was talking to Edison, who was now also holding an open beer.

  “Isn’t it illegal to drink in a post office?” I asked, then repeated, standing with my warm beer, no one listening to me. I waited, still and awkward for a minute, and then stretched out the elastic waistband of my shorts and placed my beer against my stomach and released it, my waistband holding it in place, and carefully walked inside.

  A man was behind the counter. Before him, a notebook register lay open for thru-hikers to sign, just the same as the one by the bookshelf of water. Postal workers provided this one; I nodded to the clerk—thank you—and skimmed it. It listed Freedumb, Miss Information, Yogi Beer—many of the same names I’d seen before. Also many real names: Jack, Andrew; Blake outside had signed “Blake.” The people who didn’t have trail names, yet. I found Belle!—a girl—but saw that she was three days ahead of me, probably eighty or a hundred miles to the north. Most people had scrawled gleeful, one-hundred-miles-and-onward!-type notes—and the clerk asked me, as I signed, where I was from.

  “Massachusetts,” I said. I almost added, But I go to school in Colorado—but I didn’t.

  The clerk had colorless eyes. He leaned toward me, his forearms pressing down onto the counter, bulging. His voice was croaky, low, as if he had a secret to tell me. “You’s too pretty to be a vag-bond.”

  I looked down at my box from my mother—an overstuffed fifteen-pound package of food. “Oh,” I said. And then I thanked him, and left. I walked out, just as Icecap and Edison came in. I avoided their eyes, though I sensed no memory of Eagle Rock in them, only light boyish forgetfulness. I badly wanted to forget, too.

  Out on a patch of yellowed grass by the lot, I sipped the beer Mustard had given me. I surveyed my goods. My mom had mailed me fifteen pounds of Werther’s Originals and parmesan and cute little chocolates and Kashi TLC crackers—just what I’d asked for—plus some freeze-dried green beans and berries and some calcium supplements I hadn’t asked for but probably needed. The men also unpacked their resupply boxes, and I felt watched. My food, mostly from Whole Foods, was the nicest, by far.

  Edison’s box was bizarre, filled with paper cans of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting and beef jerky and Gushers fruit candies. What didn’t fit in our overstuffed backpacks we ate right there, trading sugar for salt, bartering like schoolkids. At the bottom of my box, protected inside two Ziploc freezer bags, was—as promised—the big satellite telephone. It lay beside an innocuous little silver-gray device I hadn’t asked for. I didn’t know what it was, I just slipped it in with my things, packing it also. My beer was empty, I cracked a second.

  “That’s some shit,” Edison said, mouth bright red from cherry Pez. He was holding Icecap’s foil-sealed tuna. “Eight Pez is worth one fish.”

  Icecap let him have the tuna, didn’t want some of Edison’s “pills.”

  We wandered, canned beers gleaming in daylight in our hands, across the tiny town and got Creamsicles from the gas station. Late dusty sun slashed through the shop’s old lace curtain, heated my sun-kissed cheeks. Then, dehydrated, heavy with our packs and dru
nk, we stumbled to the “resort” and three-way-split the $90 cost of a night in a wooden cabin. The cabin had two twin-size beds. The clean room made me feel filthy. I needed a shower. I was nervous, trying to have fun, trying to relax. It was uncomfortable, imagining sleeping in a bedroom with them, still mortified and hating myself. I watched as Edison laid down his sleeping bag on the floor without discussion.

  Right in front of the boys, I called my mother. I hadn’t ever gotten through to her from the trail. But now my cell phone rang steadily; I was pacing, conscious of my body. I was nervous to hear her voice out here. I feared the old tension it carried would somehow swiftly sweep me backward. Icecap and Edison were on the rug drinking from a clear plastic bottle of tawny alcohol.

  She answered. “Hello?” my mother said quickly. She sounded at once very eager and surprised. “Hello, Debby?” At the familiar breathless upturn of her voice my stomach tightened, my neck curled my head downward, and then quickly I made an effort to try to straighten back up, embarrassed. I hoped the boys hadn’t sensed the shifting adolescent stature.

  I apologized for never having called her from the trail yet. “I never had reception. I tried.”

  Without hesitation she offered, “You can still come home.”

  I was quiet through our connection.

  Then with no pause she asked if the satellite phone had arrived. I should keep it on me, she told me, waterproofed and padded. Now she’d be waiting for my phone call nightly. I absolutely had to call before I went to sleep, or she couldn’t sleep. I understood the implication; she hadn’t been sleeping. “Now you can reach home from anywhere.” In the Mojave, from the Sierra—everywhere—I would now call my parents.

  Abruptly she asked me if I’d gotten the food she’d sent me, if I liked it, when I’d need my next food package sent, and where? Was I taking a multivitamin? How was I getting enough calcium? How were my running shoes holding up after all these miles I’d walked through the desert’s gravelly sand?