Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Read online

  A trickle of water gleamed on the curved mint green concrete wall, and little green and white wildflowers blossomed where the gravelly sand was dark and damp beneath it, their petals serrated, at once delicate and rough, like torn up lace. I swooped down and picked one as I passed, feeling wicked, still happily believing that I was nearly done with Icecap.

  We emerged on the other side of Freeway 14, ready to walk fast and hard the rest of the way to Hiker Heaven, the sweet home stretch. The desert was open, treeless and signless, and the path divided from itself, splitting into two, two distinct trails to follow, without a sign. The two dusty footpaths were both about three feet wide, both shooting out both approximately northward, but only one of them could be the Pacific Crest Trail.

  I leaned in toward the dirt. I saw a sign. Not a wood and metal sign, but faint footprints, all pointed in the direction we were going. One arm of the split held far more north-pointing feet than the other. I leaned down, closer. Flat and large in the middle of that same arm, drawn thin and shaky with a hiker’s trekking pole, was an arrow and the faint letters P C T.

  Without a word of explanation to Icecap, I went that way. Without a word, he followed.

  The trail I’d chosen soon proved right when we passed a rock painted in white letters: PCT. Hikers’ footprints and an arrow drawn in dirt with a trekking pole tip had shown me the correct way to go.

  Then it happened again. The trail split; I followed the denser footprints.

  Searching for Hiker Heaven became fun. Just when the footprints would fade out, and just when I’d begin to fear I was following a foolish band of tracks to nowhere, I’d see the next clue marking the invisible PCT. Only the knowledge I gained out here in this desert could help me discern the correct way to go.

  Walking beneath Vasquez Rocks, in and out of the shadows of tilted red stone pinnacles like wind-pressed spires of rock, as tall as towers, I never once saw the Pacific Crest Trail. Thru-hiker-made clues are what led me through. People got me through, not the trail itself. At last we emerged onto a pale gray asphalt road.

  A telephone pole bore a white paper-plate sign that told us in scrawled letters Hiker Heaven ] 1 Mile! Hanging on that same telephone pole was a trash bag—full of plums. Swinging slightly, like the one before. So they had been from Hiker Heaven. I was euphoric, excited all over for this crazy hiker fort, this hideaway, high from all the little trail-magical clues and signs and treats that made me feel this trail was made just for me, for people like me who needed it.

  Icecap and I each took our dark sweet plum. We were exhausted, hot and glittering with sweat-salt, but we sped our gait, and followed the main road past Agua Dulce Hardware and the Sweetwater Café to Big Mouth Pizza, outside of which flapped a twelve-foot-long white vinyl banner: Welcome to Agua Dulce, Pacific Crest Trail Hikers!

  Just as we began to realize that we didn’t in fact know how to get to the Figments’ Hiker Heaven, a rickety Jeep pulled up and the young woman driving called to us, “Jump in!”; she’d take us there. She’d known from our filth and our packs that we were hikers. In her creaking Jeep we rode to a long property enclosed in a white picket fence. “Here it is!” the young woman sang. She waited long enough for us to gather our knapsacks and then drove away.

  We were in a shady residential neighborhood, had arrived at last outside Hiker Heaven’s big white gate. I beamed at it; Hiker Heaven would have a big white gate with tall wide wooden double doors. And we’d made it. We rang the gate’s dinner bell, heard dogs barking, a melodic laugh and a shriek over muffled voices, and a metal latch click-ping. The gate swung open and there Chuck Norris stood before us. “Welcome,” he said. “Ass-cap! A pleasure. Good gas.” I already knew: I would leave Icecap here.

  Inside was not a hideaway but a sprawling, sunlit tent city. Dozens of hikers swung in colorful cloth hammocks and reclined in beach chairs, sat eating sweet-smelling barbecue while crystal wind chimes tinkled their music. The lawn was impossibly green, the greenest thing I’d seen since before Mexico. Pale green desert plants grew from terra-cotta pots, quivering in warm and farm-sweet breeze. A spot-shag band of mutts sprang to me, back to the beige ranch-house where crystal wind-chimes tinkled their ceaseless music, out to the shimmering gravel beneath a wide pine tree, their tails wagging wildly. They rested at last in the shade beneath the pine’s soft shaggy arms, all flat-limp in its shade. Horses neighed from across a field, spraying golden dust with each high, graceful step.

  Chuck Norris led us up the driveway, pointing out an open-walled tent stacked high with crates of clothes we could borrow. Then he brought us to “the garage,” a post-office-meets-home-style-laundromat, tidy and more organized than most small towns’ official ones. Hikers’ resupply packages filled the concrete room’s high shelves, alphabetized by whatever name or trail name was written on them. There were hundreds of them. Washers and driers spun by the concrete back wall. Before them kneeled a middle-aged woman, loading a new mound of filthy hiker laundry into an open washer: Dana “L-Rod” Figment herself. She was fit and lovely, her brown hair trimmed short, exposing suntanned skin and smiling eyes. She instructed us to go behind the house, out to the hiker trailer, and take off our dirty clothes and give her all our laundry. Inside the trailer, we should put our names on the dry-erase board on the hiker-bathroom door to sign up for a nice warm soapy shower. She had soap, Q-tips, and shampoo for us to use.

  In the space of a minute, she explained that (1) she would do our laundry while we showered; (2) we were welcome to any of the food inside the hiker trailer; (3) if we wanted pizza, we were welcome to borrow a bicycle or her car to ride to the pizza place back in town so we wouldn’t have to walk; (4) to claim a bed for the night, we should throw our packs on any open cot under the big white tents, or on a sofa or bed in the hiker trailer, or we could pitch our tents anywhere on the lawn; and (5) most astonishing and impossible of all, everything she did for us was entirely free. She hosted a maximum of fifty hikers a night and had a maximum-stay length of two nights and three days. I didn’t understand how she could do it. I asked about the fortune it must all have cost her.

  She said only, “Cast your bread upon the waters today, and God will give back tenfold tonight.” Then, “Geez, it takes so little to make you guys happy.”

  We stripped and gave our filthy clothes to Dana, went over to the loaner clothes tent and chose new outfits—there were navy blue shirts that said in white lettering Figments Electric (in real life Dana and her husband, Mitt, were electricians), all sorts of corduroy and elastic and jean shorts and sundresses and flip-flop sandals. I chose a lavender sundress, worn but clean and smelling of baby powder.

  We waited our turns to shower in the hiker trailer, the list of names on the mini whiteboard on the bathroom door expanded below ours, the names above mine—Thump, Rambo, Sketch—one by one erased. While we waited, another hiker explained that the place runs on a donation basis, pointing to a glazed maroon vase in which hikers could drop cash. It looked like any other vase on the vast premises, not advertised or marked. Dana herself never mentioned it. I slipped in forty bucks. Icecap put bills in, too.

  When it was my turn, I hung up my towel and showered, shaved with a fresh new disposable loaner razor. I scrubbed my filthy matted hair with coconut shampoo, with Georgia Peach conditioner, grinning. I ran my hands over my smooth legs, my hips and stomach, and stepped onto the scale. I stared at the number. My five-foot-four frame had lost eleven pounds. I had lost my post-rape weight, then a few pounds more. I was hungry, beautiful-slim. For the first time I felt beautiful. I felt sexy. I was happy to feel pretty, if only for myself.

  I dressed myself in the lovely low-cut dress I’d chosen and emerged seeing more clearly, as if I’d cleaned my eyes off, too. I was still wearing the same scratched-up prescription sunglasses, but no matter. The pork and pineapple on the grill, sweet-smelling, a new batch ready. Thru-hikers I’d never seen before were eating and sleeping, laying on the big lawn beneath big blue sky. My heart like a caugh
t bird, fluttering wildly.

  That evening I went to Big Mouth Pizza with Icecap and a dozen new hikers, all the men other than Icecap bearded, the only other woman named Magic. Her eyes were sweet and dark, milk chocolate brown. Through the meal, she and I exchanged sly smiles; our lives as we lived them on the trail were nearly exactly identical. We walked the same terrain, girls among men; we shared a certain power. The beards all leaned ever so slightly toward us.

  That night, I sat on Hiker Heaven’s sweet-smelling lawn and, in the light of the amber porch lights and stars and moon and flickering bonfire nearby, I opened the box my mother had sent me. It held gallon Ziploc bags full of Trader Joe’s dried blueberries, dark chocolate calcium supplements, milk chocolate calcium supplements, a bottle of Flintstones chewable vitamins. It also contained every single item I’d asked her for: sour cream and onion potato chips; three kinds of cheese; a one-pound bag of Jolly Ranchers, out of which I would pick the watermelon ones and leave the others in Hiker Heaven’s massive hiker box.

  I joined the hikers by the fire pit, each man a bearded silhouette. Never-Never was on the stump beside me, a hiker I didn’t recognize on a long low log at my other side; Never-Never was loud, talking in short, quick bursts. He was telling a story. The hikers were all listening, grinning, laughing, but I couldn’t hear it. Something was happening, I could feel it, but I couldn’t grasp it. I watched the fire; I felt someone watching me. I glanced around but was blinded by the shapes of flames like stamps of light on my vision, jumping from place to place to place my blind eyes looked.

  Never-Never was charismatic. He was the focus of the hikers’ attention. He made deadpan joke after joke, his words so short and few it sometimes took a beat to understand. When I did hear him, I laughed, though each crack was at someone’s expense. He mocked one middle-aged lady hiker who was thru-hiking with her small dog for her adoration of it. He made his voice squeaky and giddy like a teenage girl’s, his hands flapping, “Darling was a champ today. Whooo’s my champ? Ooh there’s my little Bernie-boo-champ-chum.” Never-Never flutter-flapped, “There he is.” Then he went deadpan and said in his own voice, “Funniest part is she’s killing it. Doggie’s gonna die,” and the lit bearded faces laughed and gasped.

  I could see each face better now—my eyes had adjusted to the light’s strange redness—and Magic was not around, it was only men, and I felt exhilarated, and then a little scared. The strangest thing is I wasn’t entirely sure if Icecap was there. There was a face across the fire that was thin, it looked like his, but then it didn’t. I wasn’t sure. I said aloud, “Icecap?” but I’d spoken too softly, and no one responded at all.

  Then suddenly there were marshmallows, a pillowy bag of them, passed from man to man to man to me. I smelled them toasting before I could see the bag of them moving from lap to lap. I took one and passed it on, to Never-Never. Another hiker—Salty Butt—was talking, now, about the High Sierra, about girls. I was talking to the man at my side whom I didn’t yet know; his name was Jimbo 6,000 because he was so tall, so hungry, that he needed to eat six thousand calories each day or he would starve. I understood his hunger, I told him. I was always hungry. I was probably eating about four thousand calories a day.

  While I was watching the fire silently, Never-Never would look at my legs. But when I said anything, he would scrunch up his eyebrows, frown, and squint dramatically, as if he not only hated me but wanted everyone to know that he did. A few men were talking about girls and who was hottest on the trail. One voice declared that Magic from Santa Fe was the hottest, and a chorus of voices hooted and murmured, huge tits, they agreed. She was beautiful, I thought so too, amazing glowing copper skin, elegant posture. But someone murmured, “Vulture Death”—her boyfriend. She was unavailable. Rambo, a petite little blond girl, was pretty hot, too. And Silverfox, not bad. Not bad. I was sitting right there.

  I looked into the fire. No one yelled out my name. I feared that I looked ugly, but then, of course, I knew: the thin face blocked by the big fire was Icecap’s. Wild Child and Icecap. Wild Child was unavailable, the bearded men knew.

  The talk had lulled and I tried to participate, to fit in better—said the first related thing that popped into my mind: Surf. He was the boy who’d smiled at me, way back at McDonald’s. Surf was the hottest guy on the trail; what do they think? He’s pretty handsome, isn’t he? Right?

  Salty Butt blushed, I could see even in the firelight. No one said anything.

  Icecap and I stood on Hiker Heaven’s lawn, beside his pitched tent; the night was coal black. “Surf?” He was furious. “I was also there! You had embarrassed yourself. No one likes you now.” By saying Surf was the hottest guy on the trail, he said, I had insulted every guy there. I’d implied all the guys sitting there weren’t hot.

  No one liked me now. It was my fault, I’d mortified myself. His words cut back to that feeling of my mother assuming I couldn’t dress myself and make it to school on time, of being underassessed, shut down and shut up. Of being appraised as a concerningly helpless inept child. I had to hear the opinion of my mom, my big brother, know their judgment, feel how it muted me, smothered me out, see the limitations they saw for me—there was no escaping that. My mother was my mother, but the Pacific Crest Trail was supposed to be my refuge. I hadn’t come here to be silenced by strangers. I didn’t need to know what Icecap and Salty Butt thought. I really didn’t care. So I’d bruised Icecap’s tender ego. So fucking what. I’d embarrassed him and myself; no one liked me now. Absurd.

  I felt betrayed. I was finished. These men were insecure, building identities on spreading judgment, pressing down all things weaker to gain power. I was done letting Icecap decide what behavior was appropriate, done giving him the power to make me feel little.

  I told him I had claimed the TV-couch in the hiker trailer with my knapsack, I had, and “I will be sleeping there.” In fact, I said, I’d never sleep with him in his tent again. I was breaking up with him. This was it.

  Icecap said, “Fine is good!” He walked back out across the dark lawn to the fire party, and I went to the hiker trailer couch to try to sleep. His tent was now the only tent I had; in the morning I would have to get a ride to L.A. and get a new one. I would sleep in it without him. I would.

  But then, not an hour later, me still lying there awake, Icecap appeared in the dim trailer and knelt beside my couch. He apologized to me. He was very sorry he’d gotten so angry. He leaned down to my ear and whispered that I had been right. He wanted me to come back to his tent.

  My face felt taut from dried tears, from crying too much. He told me, “You are beautiful. The most pretty.” He wrapped his hands around my face; I took his hands in mine and let him pull me upright. I followed him across the lawn to his glowing orange tent. I said nothing. I climbed inside.

  He went down on me, trying to make me come, knowing that I’d never had an orgasm, sure he could be the person to change that. I faked pleasure, faked it loud, thinking I’d said all of the right words to break up. Thinking how then he said he was sorry. He said I was right, hardly anything, but everything I wanted to hear, and now, his mouth tickling me, I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.

  After, thinking he was done, he pressed his cheek against my stomach and said that tomorrow we would get a ride to the R.E.I. in L.A. and I should get a two-person tent there. I should mail my old broken tent home.

  I awoke beside Icecap. He was already awake, but lying still and waiting for me to rouse naturally.

  “Good morning Wild Child,” he said and kissed my lips. “You were a sleepy girl.”

  Icecap spent the morning trying and trying to get my tent to stand—the pole slipped out and out and out from the metal joint. He then made it known that my tent was broken. We needed a ride to L.A. Was anyone going there? To R.E.I.?

  As he asked around, I slipped to the big desktop computer and—for the first time in a hundred and twenty miles—logged into my e-mail. My mom had sent me a story about a hiker becoming ill in
the High Sierra with pulmonary edema, a high-altitude disease. His lungs had filled with fluid, and he’d drowned. I closed the page, I didn’t want to think of the danger in Muir’s mountains. No harm would befall me, there; none could. I logged off and ran out across the gravel, to Icecap.

  We hitched a ride the twenty-eight miles west with Chuck Norris’s wife, Tigger, and a few other hikers who also needed new gear. The thought of such a distance—fifty-six miles round-trip as a day trip!—astonished me; for a moment it seemed impossible. Their van was covered with at least a hundred trail names written in every color of Sharpie, a mobile register; it was ridiculous and charming. Icecap and I shared the mattress in the back where Chuck Norris and Tigger slept together when they weren’t sleeping on the trail. We lay into the old couple’s bed, rocking along the road, to sleep, down to L.A. where I’d flown to meet my father before I’d taken a single step. All my progress erased. I felt the bed, Icecap pressing against me. I felt sad in my half sleep. My mind was caught on that boy from my mother’s e-mail—the dangers of the mountains. I felt very small.

  Icecap had confidence and competence I lacked and desperately needed. I trusted him to keep me safe. Maybe my trust of Icecap could blossom into love. At a gas stop I woke with a jolt and Icecap and I signed Chuck and Tigger’s van: Icecap + Wild Child. I was becoming afraid.

  At R.E.I. I chose a two-person tent, the bigger model of my broken tent, the same green color. The salesclerk who showed me it was sure I needed a ground tarp to lay under it, too, and Icecap agreed, but I said no. A ground tarp was unnecessary weight. Icecap still didn’t understand my ultralightness. I paid $269.95 for our new home with my parents’ money and wandered out into the strip mall’s lot, the sun hot and pallid, the sky flat rich L.A. blue. I walked toward Skinny Chick Smoothie to get a frozen yogurt, passed an old man hobbling, his body pressing down into his cane, passed two teenaged lovers, swinging hands. I ordered a large mango smoothie, famished and feeling catastrophically out of place. Icecap would mail his own tent back home at the next post office. Maybe moving in together would change things between us.