Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Page 18

  She appeared as promised. Maria’s house was small and white, and inside it smelled like roasted corn and pork, absolutely delicious. The walls showcased several gorgeous wedding photos, blown up to three and even five feet tall. The bride was childlike, tanned and very pretty. The groom was older, pale, but handsome still. The woman in the pictures must have been a young Maria.

  Her husband wasn’t home, she apologized. He was away, “bothering hikers” for the weekend.

  “Doing trail magic?” I asked.

  “Yes, he really loves it.”

  Maria had made tacos for us from scratch, dozens of them, and laid out delicate crimped-edge porcelain bowls of minced green peppers, tomato and onion salsa, a dozen pretty little dishes on her small round table. She told us to go run and shower. We did, though we were hungry and would rather just eat filthy. We changed into oversize “loaner clothes”—huge faded T-shirts and shorts with elastic waistbands—and then, at last, she pulled corn taco shells out of the oven and carried over ceramic pots of spicy ground beef and pulled pork.

  Soon we had devoured a dozen tacos’ worth of fixings each. Maria brought out more of everything. “Keep going,” she kept saying, “you are starving.”

  I asked about the wedding pictures. “They’re so beautiful,” I said. “Is that you, the bride?”

  “Me, yes,” she said, it was. It was “a story.”

  She told us that once, when she was young, she went to a church retreat in the forest. One night, the minister told her that she should take a walk. “When, out in the woods, you turn around,” he told her, “whoever is looking at you will be the man God wants you to marry.”

  She walked a ways, into dim woods, terrified, thinking how her timing could change her life, wondering if she had any power over her fate. That—she said—remains the mystery. She walked slowly through the moonlit trees, the night a velvet sea. She turned around. She found her widowed boss behind her, an “old, white man.” He was twenty years her senior, pale and very thin. She was not attracted to him. She could not imagine ever loving him. “I was like, oh please Papi Lord, not him. I was like, anybody out here now but him.” But she resigned to it. She knew that God had done it.

  Six weeks later, she married the man she met in the shadowed woods that night.

  That was fifteen years ago. Now she loves her husband terribly. Now when he leaves on summer weekends to do trail magic, she misses him so much she cannot sleep. Her eyes were bright with tears as she told the story. Here she was feeding strangers in her little cottage, missing him, nostalgic; she seemed divine, and wonderfully happy. She held in her eyes pure and total faith in love.

  What magic.

  In the photos she looked twenty—near my age. She had big eyes, full lips, a messy bun of curly hair, like me. She was pretty. In my closed eyes I saw shadowed forests and imagined my future love among trees, also seeking: walking blind into the woods with such faith in love.

  It seemed such a perfect blip of storied hope. There was something romantic about the notion of walking blind into the woods and finding love, building a home in which Mexican spices mixed with the scent of sweet pines and endless mountain wind.

  I had never worn a diamond, but I suddenly wanted one, or a bright ruby like a talisman that told me I was loved and would be safe for always.

  And I saw with clarity that my relationship with Icecap was not what I had hoped it was. Icecap gave me hope for change—his confidence inspiring mine, his adoration lighting me up like a moon—but my bond to him felt delicate. In truth it felt temporary, fire sparks flaring in a strong wind, the wind pressing me forward toward its light faster. The trail would end in Canada. We were reserved for the trail. He would fly back to Switzerland. I would go somewhere else. I didn’t actually think we would get to travel together before the light we chased burned out.

  I knew that my relationship with him was ending. My affection for Icecap was beautiful, but it was not really love. What I felt with him was trust. But my hope was fiercer now. I was seduced by the idea of walking blind into the woods, and from darkness finding love.

  As days went by, Icecap became less amenable to resting. He had to finish the trail by September third because he had a Phish concert to get to in Portland on the fifth. Also, his United States traveler’s visa was going to expire in September, so he had to finish the trail before then. Also he was starting school on September seventh, so he wanted to finish the trail in August. Whenever I suggested taking a break he’d fiddle and fidget, uneasy, as if I had proposed snorting cocaine or driving drunk. He’d say words like willpower and commitment and drive. One bright open day after we’d traversed a desert ridge for seven unstopping hours, I collapsed onto my pack and found in it my crumpled, scrawled list, THINGS DANIEL HATES, and added in dark ink: THREE.

  Number ONE: windmills,

  TWO: the wind.

  THREE: breaks.

  I smoothed it flat, heart shaken. This time it didn’t seem sweet. It didn’t seem funny. Icecap hates windmills; Icecap hates wind. Soon he would announce he hated sand, and also beaches. He would list things he despised.

  For the sake of speed, we bypassed a cardboard sign that said Meadow Mary’s Magic, and then later a paper beneath a stone right in the blond dirt of the trail that read Free Hiker Foot Massages by Hector. At a wide junction, where a quiet Jeep road crossed our trail, we stood, arguing about which way to go, whether to go or not. A poster-board sign at the junction said Thru-hiker Bananas and Beer 1,000 Yards above an arrow that pointed down the Jeep road. I told Icecap I needed to go see. It would be fun. An echoing hoot! resounded from down the road. I widened my eyes at him to say see, to use my feminine power to sway him. He kept walking up our trail without me. “’Bye then,” he called back as he hiked onward, north.

  I jogged behind him, going too fast for myself, furious at myself and him. I decided this was the last time I would bypass a trail angel so Icecap could make this pilgrimage a race. There was no competition. The first to reach Canada would only be in Canada, no trophy in hand, likely all alone. Dana “L-Rod” Figment, the Pacific Crest Trail’s most famed and beloved trail angel, lay only sixty miles ahead, on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert, at a shady oasis she’d built known along the trail as Hiker Heaven. I couldn’t miss that. I absolutely wouldn’t.

  I caught Icecap and kissed him, though I didn’t feel affection. I kissed him to soothe him, to calm him down, if I could.

  “Why do you call at me this? Ass-cap?” he asked me then.

  “Icecap?”

  “You want to name me?”

  I didn’t understand. Icecap was his name. I’d already named him. He knew about trail names, everyone had one. “Icecap” was how he’d signed the registers. I hadn’t known he was unhappy with “Icecap.” It was true, though, that no one else called him by it—but then nobody else talked to us at all. We were isolated, outsiders within the trail community around us. Suddenly I wanted other people to know me—Wild Child. Not just him. He’d become a coach to me, like a dad. A prison. I didn’t need that. I needed to make my own rules.

  “You want to be something else?” I asked. “What do you want to be?”

  He thought for a moment, solemn, and then said he had the most comfortable inflatable sleeping pad on the whole trail, and said, “It is ze best, most comfy. Call me Pad Man.”

  I laughed. “I’m not calling you that, sorry,” I said. Really, though, he didn’t seem like Icecap to me anymore. Out loud, I was still calling him Icecap, but privately I’d reverted back to Daniel. I noticed I’d titled the list THINGS DANIEL HATES.

  “Pad Man,” he said, his voice slow and tight. “That’s who I am.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you’re Daniel. You don’t get to choose whatever random thing you want to be.”

  But when the next day we met a hiker named Chuck Norris, a big potbellied guy with long copper blond hair who was from the Florida panhandle, Daniel introduced himself as “Icecap.�
�� At Icecap’s name, Chuck Norris stopped walking. “What was that?” He was grinning big. He was huge and goofy and warm and seemed unrepressed, farting loudly as he walked the road north with us, ignoring his gas.

  “Ass-cap,” Icecap said, more slowly this time, annoyed.

  “Okay Ass-cap,” Chuck Norris howled. He cracked up. “No beans now or you’ll pop!”

  Chuck Norris quaked with laughter, his whole body shaking. I was laughing, too, I couldn’t help it. Icecap paled, mad and embarrassed, having no clue what the joke was.

  Chuck Norris recomposed himself and got back to telling his life story. His daughter had just gotten married in the most beautiful dress. His lovely wife was a woman named Tigger, but she was doing trail magic at the moment, wasn’t on-trail now. He loved her “much as cherry ice-cream pie.” He’d met her in the woods, on the 2,180-mile-long Appalachian Trail. He’d been thru-hiking it. She’d been thru-hiking it, too, by good God’s luck.

  “I am Pad Man, actually,” Icecap said to Chuck Norris, apropos of nothing, in a lull.

  I would watch diligently now for the trail angel signs, and, when I saw the next portal into that world, I’d take it. I’d turn off the PCT and onto it. I’d slip in—without Icecap.

  CHAPTER 12

  DISTANCE TO PARADISE

  There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths

  Where highways never ran;—

  But let me live by the side of the road

  And be a friend to man.

  —FROM THE POEM TAPED TO THE CONCRETE WALL ABOVE

  HIKER HEAVEN’S WASHER AND DRYER

  MAY 15, PINYON FLATS, THE CALIFORNIA DESERT NEAR SULFUR SPRINGS, MILE 400

  The desert had become beautiful. Radiant evening light bleached the hills of low scrub oaks white-gold. A long desert jackrabbit, the ghostly color of dust, bounded across the open desert floor, spraying silver sand. Indian Ricegrass curled like wild animal hair, tracing both sides of the trail in two thick lines to the horizon. My path was singular and clear. I no longer wanted the desert to end. I had become strong, walking here. I was happy.

  Icecap and I walked without talking and camped somewhere on a high ridge, between golden dust and soft pink sky, empty of things to say to each other. He pitched his tent and I climbed into it, as I’d done the night before, and the night before that, too. I no longer had to build my own shelter each night. It was nice. I crawled inside and sat behind the tent’s small arched doorway, removing my running shoes.

  From outside, Icecap flatly told me, “Get out of there.”

  “What?” I said, annoyed, not looking at him.

  “Get out!” he repeated with such intensity that I feared he’d seen a rattlesnake nesting on my sleeping bag.

  I pulled my feet under myself and ducked back out of his tent, heart speeding, carefully stood up, too scared to take one barefoot step. But he was off beside a pale rock, peeing, not looking at me. “What?” I asked again. “Icecap. What?”

  He said he didn’t like how I kicked my shoes off from the inside of his tent. It was “a mess.” I should take them off outside. I always got dirt inside.

  I was barefoot. I was exasperated and out of pace with myself, working my knees until they ached to stay with a guy who would rather race to Canada than have any fun at all, whom I’d told I loved but no longer even liked. I said nothing back to him. I stepped slowly back to his tent, knelt, and wiggled my feet back into my stinky, dusty shoes. Kicked them back off. Ducked and crawled back inside and shook deep into my sleeping bag.

  A minute later, he came in, too. We’d stopped putting our rainflies on and I stared up through Icecap’s tent’s low mesh roof, didn’t look at him. Our hike. I didn’t start out with Icecap. I didn’t ever intend to hike with him. Yet I’d camped with Icecap all but just three nights. My first night on the trail, the night in the flood wadi with a stranger, and the night I hiked alone through spider webs, the moon high and pale, the sky dry-blood red-black, walking through the night to get away from Edison and Icecap.

  Now, inside Icecap’s tent, I felt melancholy. My knees were bruised. I felt Icecap lying next to me, not touching me, neither of us sleeping as the air above his tent’s mesh roof darkened to blood spattered with stars, to velvet black. In that darkness beside him, I was remembering what I was walking across this desert to shed, remembering that no one could do it for me. It was time to begin again the work I’d come out here to do.

  It was time to stop compromising. I should have stopped compromising long ago, before I let Junior overstay his welcome, before I lost myself to 66-tattooed Tyler. Before two red-black seeds at once dropped from me and grew in me, my limbs its limbs, my face its terrible face.

  I felt every mile I’d walked with Icecap was wasted. I needed, for once, to walk alone. It occurred to me that I was in a relationship. This was my first relationship; Icecap actually was my boyfriend. I was a girlfriend. We were a couple. I didn’t know how to end a relationship. It took time to break up a relationship, it seemed to me. The next day as I walked out front, he following, I plotted how I’d leave him.

  It was daunting—not the thought of being alone, but of telling him I was going. I opened my mouth, then closed it, entirely unprepared to say something final. We walked along like that, me in front, my back to him, imagining he wasn’t there, wishing he would leave me, but still unable to flee, myself.

  The trail cut across the side of a steep mountain ridge, paralleling Pacifico Mountain Road, which snaked along the high crest above us. We were in the tan shade the ridge cast, on a thin trail that did not ascend to the ridge or descend to the valley, but hovered between five and six thousand feet. The mountain’s shadow darkened, and desert scrub oak gave way to thicker, grand oak trees, their canopies broad, their shadows over shadows. Miner’s lettuce grew bright green in that cool shade. Icecap stooped down and plucked a tuft, passed it to me, stooped in his stride and picked another for himself. The leaves were flat green, bright as stained glass glowing in golden noon light, almost yellow in their luminescence. I ate the crisp flat leaves and stems, listening to the snap of stems still alive. We walked faster. California junipers rustled in the warm wind, smelling sad, of roses and of gin. I picked two juniper berries, tiny hard frosted blue, and opened my palm to Icecap. He took one. At last we shared a moment’s rest, put them on our tongues like after-dinner mints. His delicate hands looked sad. I realized we had walked in silence all day.

  Near the light’s end that evening, the sun low and red, air chilled as if blown off invisible ice, we approached what looked like a distant pendulum, thick and dark, hanging from a tree. It looked like a small body. Closer, we saw it was a black plastic garbage bag swinging on a rust-red-brown manzanita limb. I peered in and sugar kissed me. The bag was full of plums. A paper note taped to the bag said “Thru-hikers enjoy” with no signed name. Gifts simply came. I broke one’s skin with my teeth, heard the fresh snap. It was sweet as honey. It swept me back to the grapefruits, pink and huge, that Icecap and I had found our first day alone together, back when I’d first felt safe.

  That night I built my own shelter again, at last. It had been a week since I’d slept in my own tent but felt like so much longer. I missed its smell: desert sage and dusty nylon. That smell was right. Like shelter—a room of my own. Yet when I stood back to look at my work, I saw that my good old tent wasn’t standing. It was drooped, flopped into itself like a sheet draped limp over a scrawny bush. In my weak lamplight, I examined it. To my horror, the most important tent pole joint had snapped. My tent was now dead weight. I no longer had a place to go, a home.

  Icecap was nearby, a floating headlamp on an adjacent gravel tent pit. He was eating the hot dinner that he cooked himself each night. I approached him and asked to please borrow his duct tape.

  “Why is this?” he asked. I didn’t want to have to explain; I was exhausted. “You want to take my tape that I carry?”

  I mumbled to him that my tent collapsed.

  He inhaled,
exhaled dramatically. “Because you break it!” He said that I should take better care of my things. He threw his duct tape at me and I caught it. I taped the joint together. It sagged apart. Duct tape was not strong enough to hold the three metal poles in place. My house was now hopelessly collapsed.

  That night, I took my shoes off outside, trembling with exhaustion and with rage. I had to sleep with Icecap in his tent. I lay beside him and closed my eyes to the rhythmic woooh wooooh wooh of him blowing up his inflatable sleeping pad, as he always did, fell asleep to it. Plotted in my half-dream how at the Figments’ Hiker Heaven, I’d leave him. I’d walk into the High Sierra alone.

  Right beside him, I called my mother. I still called her every night. When she asked how my day was, I told her my tent had broken. She asked did I need her to send another overnight? She reminded me I could use her credit card if I could get to town. I told her I could stay with someone, Icecap, in his tent that night.

  “That’s good,” she said, not asking anything more. Then she paused. “Do you need me to mail you out some vitamins?” Then, “I love you, Debby. We love you and we miss you. Pleasant dreams.”

  I hung up feeling empty and far away. Our nightly conversation on this satellite phone she made me carry was bland and repetitive. I was beginning to resent it. I hated my inability to explain my life on the trail to her and my mother’s inability to comprehend. I hated her consistent need to know the list of different foods I’d eaten that day. I remembered how she’d asked me if I’d had a good dinner in the same phone call when I’d told her I’d been raped.

  I considered, tomorrow night, not calling her.

  MAY 17, VASQUEZ ROCKS, THE CALIFORNIA DESERT, MILE 451

  Icecap and I crossed the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad, unending in both directions, descended a gradual half-dozen miles, into Escondido Canyon, down to where Antelope Valley Freeway 14 crosses the PCT, traffic flashing over a wide concrete bridge. The trail passed through a tunnel under the freeway, and then in just ten more flattish, easy miles, we’d emerge in the small town of Agua Dulce—wherein existed the famous Hiker Heaven. Just ten more miles to paradise.