Girl in the Woods Read online

  “No one’s out here,” I told him. “Seriously relax.” Then I turned my hips away, open toward Icecap. I was looking to Icecap for permission to escape.

  Edison’s reply was only a mumble. “Ass cunt.”

  I’d hoped he’d say something horrible like that back to me. “Why’s that?” I said. I could have been all done. Instead my eyes spit venom. I finally challenged him.

  “I ain’t fucking night hiking,” Edison said, so loud the fuck echoed. And that was that.

  I resumed walking. Icecap stalled, rearranged his awkward limbs, eyes on my back. This was his moment to show alliance. But he didn’t follow. I was leaving Edison, and Icecap was staying. So I left them together.

  I built my camp late that night alone. I wasn’t scared. Snug in my tent I wasn’t thinking about how I’d lost them both. I listened to my dad’s music, feeling I was going to be beautiful and triumphant and rebellious. Then, I wrote. In the dark, in my hardback journal, I lay down fragments of old poems and storybooks made new by my forgetfulness, memories, walking through woods in dreams of waking/made by an ancient season/summoning spring newly. I penned: Writing is a way to make a living dreaming wild dreams.

  It was to me the truest—most hopeful—thing I’d written on the trail yet.

  I woke that next morning late, unsure if the guys were behind me or ahead. The night before I’d written in moon’s shadow-light for hours. The new morning felt colder, and frost glittered on the fine dust and yellow grass. I shivered and grinned. “Helllooooo!” I called, expecting an echo, hearing none. “Iiiiiim free.”

  In cool daylight I passed Combs Peak, Tule Canyon, and Tule Canyon Creek, approaching a notable road called Pines to Palms highway. The sky shone lollipop blue. I reached the road that midafternoon, hungry, tranquil but also feeling charged and happy. The highway was wide and quiet, and I slipped through a gap in a fat cow grate to finally reach it.

  In the distance, I saw a dark clump of people sitting. Six thru-hikers were huddled below a brown tarp fastened like a drooped roof to three stunted manzanitas and a backpack, and—closer—I noticed that one was a girl. I jogged over and ducked down to join them in the block of gold-tinted shade. But the pack didn’t acknowledge me. One looked up, through me, out to the silent arid hills.

  “Hey? Hey.” I nodded at the only girl I’d seen in a long time. She was baby blond and thin as a dancer, folded up onto herself, delicate legs neatly crossed. Her eyes were blocked from me by a huge floppy straw hat. “I’m Wild Child.” She was humming a tune, sewing a patch on an emptied backpack. She looked up at a young, olive-skinned guy, Turkish looking, and said, “Here, Squirrel. ’S done.” She broke the thread off with her teeth, elegant even as she bit.

  She was the only woman of their crew, and older—about twenty-seven or even thirty.

  The olive-skinned man leaned in, took the patched-up backpack from her. He thanked and thanked her again, perhaps ten times. They were ignoring me.

  “I’m Wild Child,” I said, wanting to be acknowledged. I leaned closer to the woman. “What’s your name?”

  She answered without looking at me. “Silverfox.”

  “Oh, Silverfox!” Hers was a name I’d wondered about since the very first register! I wanted to ask her every question. “Where did you come here from?” She answered curtly. She’d lived in Hawaii. She was a yogi and a dancer. She’d worked on ships in the Pacific. This was her new crew. They’d all met on the first day on the trail, so it was fate.

  “Lots of people meet on the first day,” I said.

  “Hey, Squirrel,” she said, her voice quiet, melodic. “You need some water.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Silverfox passed him a Nalgene bottle. “You should hydrate before you’re thirsty,” she said, as he chugged. This group was a pack, but I didn’t actually feel the closeness among these men; they felt it was fated that they had met each other, and I observed their little cluster’s closeness, but right now all I felt was Silverfox. This cult was one that revolved around this girl. She looked at me, finally. Her eyes were glacier turquoise—gorgeous—striking out here. “What was that, hon?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, happy to finally get her direct attention. I should say something smart, I thought, her eyes so huge and marine, two lit globes. She looked to me like the ideal woman on the trail. She seemed to be what I wanted to become. “Can I hike with you guys?” I said. I hadn’t meant to ask like that.

  “Sure honey,” she said without a pause. Someone handed me a quarter of a big, delicious cheeseburger, still hot, the orange cheese melted. It smelled like Johnny’s Luncheonette in Newton Centre. “You’re burnt.” She passed me her sunscreen, the Banana Boat kind that smelled like summer camp.

  I smeared it on my cheeks, my neck, my breasts and thighs, feeling at once welcome and excluded, like a girl joining a cult for the purpose of research. Silverfox was all any of us saw. I felt the eyes of the others on her, how they looked at her, spoke to her, and I felt the heat of envy. Silverfox became in my eyes the vision of the powerful woman I wished to be.

  “Your mother should teach you to use sunscreen before you’re crispy,” Silverfox said, her voice a soft hum.

  “Sorry,” I said, too loud, squinting at her.

  That evening I built my camp with Silverfox, Squirrel, and the four other guys whose names all smudged together. I couldn’t get them straight. We made a campfire, told stories about other hikers we’d met, made fun. No one talked so much about life before the trail. I confused the men’s names, offending them, but I couldn’t care less about learning anything about these smudgy men. It was only when Silverfox squinted at me, disapproving of my repeated mistake, that I felt embarrassed. I asked Silverfox about Hawaii, “Are you from there, originally?” and all she said was, “No.” We slept on spongy pine needles at the spot Silverfox had apparently already decided everyone would camp—we’d all stopped with her when she stopped without question.

  That night, snug-warm in my sleeping bag, my tent only feet from Squirrel’s and Strider’s, I called my mom. I placed the GPS on my tent’s cool nylon floor and waited for it to “locate satellites” and my coordinates to appear. I whispered them to my mother through the phone, her yelling to me, “Talk louder. I can’t. Hear! You,” me whisper-talking at her, “Shh Mom! You’re hurting my ear.” I gave her my coordinates and she repeated them back, I knew she was transcribing them, saying she loved me, saying “pleasant dreams.”

  I slept deeply that night, feeling safe even beside all those men, their tents snug against mine, our tarp and tent cords crossing in an intricate web. I felt Silverfox had them under control. And yet I sensed, I knew in my palms, that Silverfox didn’t want me with them, there. This pack of men was her entourage, not mine. She was my mirror image, slightly distorted, flipped, older, larger, more able to coexist with a pack of men. I’d be their pawn. She was their queen.

  These men hiked the trail with hope of sexual freedom—a wilderness with wild girls, no rules. But girls were rare. Empty space was vast. A man could hike for weeks not seeing a woman. Condoms would freeze at night and, jostled in overstuffed knapsacks, actually shatter. Undamaged ones would prove just as useless. Months into this long hike, up in the volcano lands of Northern California, take-what-you-need, leave-what-you-don’t “Hiker Boxes” would begin to fill with old beat-up condoms, carried a thousand miles before being abandoned, purposeless.

  Because here is the math. There is one girl for every five guys on the trail. Half of these women hike with a significant other. So the ratio of single girls to single guys is one to ten. This was the nature of the trail. Be a girl. Be surrounded by men who are longing.

  I’d left college to get away from young reckless men, yet I’d run away from them, directly into herds of them. I’d found the odd place on earth where men multiply and women divide: ten guys to one girl. If anything, I’d magnified the risks of college.

  That next morning, before anyone else had gotten
out and broken down their tents, I left them all. I didn’t need Silverfox and her crew of sheepish losers. I ran from them, as had become my pattern. I wasn’t scared of them. I simply felt unwelcome. And I didn’t need them, so I didn’t have to stay and feel that way.

  The day was blue and beige, like a desert beach. Wide open. I wondered where Icecap and Edison were, if Icecap was still with Edison, if Icecap would have left Edison to be with me if I were more like Silverfox. If I could ever someday find the way to be so powerful.

  Alone, I hiked without stopping. Into a green oasis and out of it: flat desert. Into a sanctuary of pines. Up to a shadeless ridge, narrow and exposed. There was no water up here. I was glossy with sweat, my arms looking polished and lean. I was on top of Southern California. I felt sexy out here, skinnier, a girl striding herself northward. I could be an actress. I could be on The Daily Show, talking about my heartsick character. I felt ready to walk alone for a very long time.

  I was high on a narrow ridge. To the east, Palm Springs’s green sunny fields. That’s where the Pines to Palms highway takes you now: Palm Springs’s golf courses: the resort. Los Angeles’s richer residents come to desert, to a valley below snowy mountains, and whack golf balls. To the west, vast foothills. The San Jacinto’s icy, periwinkle peaks to the north, smack before me. The trail bloomed. Blossoms the color of sunsets, pink with orange centers, yellow blade-thin rims. The ridge widened, no longer a fine crest, now a hump, lower, a persistent snaking hill. I passed over a patch of drooping blooms like orange Chinese lanterns, elegant, suspended above the desert of beige. Even out in this swell of dust and silt, desert flowers look clean. I saw deep red stains in sky that should be blue.

  I felt around in my hip-belt pocket’s mesh pouch for a candy, only to realize I had just one left. My very last watermelon Jolly Rancher. I didn’t see how that could be—there had been so many. Back in the hotel with my father, I’d separated the watermelon Jolly Ranchers from the others, spilled them all carefully into my knapsack. Now, I unzipped the pocket fully and peered in. “No no no,” I said aloud; how had this happened. Cherry was the only other kind I liked enough to carry, but it wasn’t comforting. It didn’t taste like wandering the green fields beyond the baseball game, to the woods, while Jacob played.

  My face felt very hot. My legs felt cold. I was shocked to see that I was squatting on gleaming feather-white snow. Frost glittered on the white fir needles, the ponderosa pine cones at my feet. Ice crystals grew in curls from under dry cold rocks. I’d been walking on endless glistening packed snow. I had been climbing, gaining elevation, and the trail was not a trail any longer, only a wide band of footprints.

  I studied the tracks. Icecap’s swoosh-dot-dot—I knew it well by now—wasn’t among them. I had climbed three thousand feet, but the mounting had been mindless, and it felt I’d just appeared here in the San Jacinto Mountains, a snowy world above Southern California.

  The hillside I was walking along steepened, my right foot awkwardly lower than my left. For stretches, the trail was one-foot narrow, almost gone. I feared it would disappear altogether. Without the trail I was just on a steep and frost-slick hillside in a vast wilderness. This place on the trail felt more dangerous than all of the others. I wasn’t scared that I’d be lost here; I thought I could always backtrack. It was that I had committed myself to following this specific path and without the trail to lead me, I felt I would somehow be more vulnerable. I felt unsure of my footing. The evergreen tops three feet below my shoes looked pointy and abrasive. Then they were fifteen feet below, then fifty, a deadly four-story fall down to them. Something could go wrong, and I’d have no chance of getting help.

  At last I stopped. I stared at the blank snow slope, frantic, vexed. Snow holds tracks well, yet there wasn’t a footprint here. I glanced down, up, down, desperate for a sign of the tread way, for the route forward. But I was lost.

  I kept hiking. Out onto a death-slide, ice-slicked and sheer. If I were a mountaineer, armed with everything Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills recommended—much less the ten “necessities”—my backpack would be heavy with thick climbing rope and carabineers and steel-spiked crampons to strap to plastic boots for better traction; I’d set up a belay system with knotted ropes and, with each footstep, stab my ice ax’s shaft through the ice crust to prevent a fall. But I was an ultralight thru-hiker. I had only my running-shoe-clad feet and my own recklessness and skill.

  The snow chute gleamed like a blade’s edge, and I trudged. Kick toe-toe-in, and step; I inched, higher. My legs shook, tired. I felt dread tighten in my chest. I wanted this to be the way, because I could do it—I was scared to try to cross the chute, but I could climb here—though it was wrong, and it wouldn’t ever get me to where I needed to go.

  And now I’d stranded myself. I pivoted, feet stuck-safe, legs pulsing with warm blood through numb skin. Adrenaline drugged me. Below, the city of Palm Springs looked close, reachable, a giant yellow gem gleaming through my fright’s haze. I could go glissade down and call it the Amber City. It’d be like the Emerald City, Dorothy Gale’s first destination, only this one was real. Maybe I’d stride down and down this slope, through snow then shrubs, to there, to finally have a shower. I was filthy, calves splattered with slush-mud, my hair matted. A grocery store would have huge bags of Jolly Ranchers, but I’d just have the watermelon kind. Then I’d slip back to Newton, to my house, to bed, into sugared sleep.

  I daydreamed short-cuts to comfort not knowing that Palm Springs is the classic trap. Hikers actually die in pursuit of those gold lights. It happens, I would soon learn, nearly every year.

  They are lost or cold or shocked from a tall fall; they see the lights of Palm Springs and wander toward them. This is their first, irreversible mistake: after falling, abandoning the trail and heading not back up toward the crest, but downhill. Into the bush. Toward the magic-trap city that kills fallen hikers. They must navigate ten thousand feet of elevation loss through scrub oaks, down rock-ledge cliffs. There is water, but not much, and they may never stumble upon it. There is no cached water, no trail magic. The town always looks closer than it is. The hiker, even in good health, with good maps, gallons of water on him, will take three or four days, arrive scraped up. More hikers, though, will lack something they need. They’ll get lost in trees, on cliff tops, hungry, mad. They’ll cramp with thirst or hunger, lost. Fatigued, they’ll trip. Over a cliff.

  On the day he retired, April 19, 2005, John “Sea Breeze” Donovan left for California’s border with Mexico. In San Diego, his final stop before the Border Monument, he lit two candles, one to honor Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers, and one to Saint Anthony, patron saint of the lost. Then he joined the trail. He hiked steadily until—in a freak snowstorm on May 6—snow dumped down on the San Jacinto Mountains. In a desert snowstorm, he scrambled up the ridge, missed Saddle Junction, and became lost—where I now stood. Disappeared.

  The thru-hiking community is small, and when someone in it dies, his loss is felt deeply. Sea Breeze was a thru-hiker—vanished. Four years later, trail angels and trailblazers still spoke of his strange sad disappearance. I heard his name in Warner Springs, in woods, in trail-town bars. In a register five miles south of Idyllwild, his legend was a warning:

  The Riverside County Sheriff clearly did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. They literally said, “Maybe he wants to be missing.” Missing day hikers and weekend backpackers were understandable to them, but they did not understand thru-hiking the PCT, someone not having a specific arrival date at a trailhead, or the depth of meaning of a hiker not picking up their box.

  Everyone who arrived here at Hiker Heaven was asked if they’d seen John, aka Sea Breeze. . . . There was an intense juxtaposition of oblivious NoBo hikers having the time of their lives, and the unfolding tragedy. . . .

  The night before he vanished, Mr. Donovan had camped with a group, but was not a “regular member” of that group . . . as the hikers studied their maps and got out th
eir compasses to choose their route for the next day, Mr. Donovan did not pay attention or come over. . . . When they broke camp and took off hiking the next morning, Mr. Donovan was slower than those he had camped with. Those who saw him last thought that he was behind them, and were completely unaware that he had become lost. . . . In fact, no one was aware that he was missing for many days. . . .

  The San Jacintos have claimed many victims, the area is vast and extremely rugged and steep with breathtaking vertical exposure and long runouts. It’s famous for being icy in early season. Some missing are simply never found. You probably know that while they were searching for John, they found the skull of a missing hiker from years before.

  We would later learn he had died before his absence was noticed, and certainly before the Search and Rescue was called into action.

  I see so many hikers every year heading out similarly ill-prepared: inadequate food, water, maps, clothing, and shelter, paired with a cavalier or over-confident attitudes. If only my angel wings could stretch as far as I wish they would.

  The note was signed “L-Rod,” also known as Dana Figment, the Pacific Crest Trail’s most beloved trail angel, the matron of Hiker Heaven.

  Reading the page, I was struck by Sea Breeze’s lack of tact, his defiance and isolation. I carried no maps and often declined to look at Icecap’s; I felt alone, had wanted to be alone, had wanted “to be missing.” I was struck by how much I—a girl, nineteen—was like this lost, dead man. Now I was stranded, trying to discern for myself the right path toward the promise of lights that flicker through the distance: imagined paradise.

  A year to the day after Sea Breeze vanished, on May 6, 2006, Brandon Day and Gina Allen decided to ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up into the San Jacinto Mountains. They were both from Texas and on their second date, having met at Coachella. Down by their Palm Springs hotel, they could lounge at swimming pools shaded with palm trees and play golf on dewy green courses with Los Angeles escapists. Just ten minutes in a tram, though, and they stood high in snowy mountains, Chino Canyon vast below them. In these mountains, just east of Saddle Junction, Brandon and Gina looked around, stunned and grinning. They ambled around the mountain plateau in a five-hundred-meter radius, stuck to wide, flat trails. They hadn’t planned to wander too far from the top. They’d expected to take a day hike, had no food or water, and no shelter—nothing. But then they heard a waterfall down below and walked off path, downhill, to snap a picture of it.