Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Read online

  At each summer’s end, we’d kiss Grandma Belle and Grandpa Mel goodbye, drive away from Colorado Springs, its twinkling gold lights fading, black mountains growing. Mommy, Daddy, Jacob and I’d drift soundless toward mountains and go backpacking.

  We’d hike through aspen forests, along high ridges, down to valley-lakes. The trails were veins, the mountainscape a body infinitely beautiful and novel. And it was our home—at least for seven perfect days each year.

  My father would catch fish. He’d stand in the center of a creek, in the calm below the churning rapids, and cast and cast and cast his line until a sharp tug told him we had food. He’d reel it in and say, “All right. Some trout.” And then he’d grip its core and slam its head against a rock. I’d hold out my warm palms, the fish still twisting, flapping madly. Fluttering like a shot-clipped bird.

  It would fall into my palms’ small softness, dead.

  By the time I’d hopped from rock to river-rock and then up the trail to our camp, the fish would be limp, its eyes bulging. I’d give it to my mom. She’d have already smashed Wheat Thins with a spoon expecting it, and without a word about the fish—it was always about us, if we were cold or too warm or in need of any thing—clean out the guts and roll it in the shards of cracker.

  And then beneath the strung-gem Milky Way, brightening in the blackening sky, she’d heat the pan over a tiny stove, the oil hopping, searing hot. I’d stand close to her, smelling the fat, smelling the granite-chilled air so cold and piney. The fish would fry till golden and my father would be back and my brother would need food. He’d be doing crunches in the dirt.

  We’d eat the fish together: all there. All fed. It was always crisp and flaky, sometimes a little fishy, drip-wax white and wild. We’d caught this food, I’d think. We would eat it all, translucent bones the only bits left on our plates, so white in the moon’s light, as thin as dried-up veins.

  Each cluster of stars like city lights in fog. Too many specks to ever really see.

  And I would always think: we are a tribe, foraging for berries, catching fish. Crushing wheat thins so the fish tastes good.

  If we all did what we should, we would survive.

  Our fire flared and wavered, found a new pine limb and slipped across it quick as an ink drop bursts in water, huge, growing beautifully. Snapping and spitting. Burning my white cheeks.

  My very best memory with my dad is from one of those Colorado summers. I was eight or maybe nine. He took me—just me—on a drive through Colorado Springs, up to The Bluffs. I hardly ever got to be alone with him. We walked, he first, me following.

  We didn’t talk. I imagined he was William Clark and I was Captain Meriwether Lewis. I’d watched a documentary on them in school and read some thick, gorgeously illustrated picture books, and I loved the story: they discovered new places no one had ever seen; they were professional explorers who got to discover new landscapes for the President, which is what I wanted to be when I grew up and got to choose my job. I told my dad this. He said, “Eureka! I don’t think no one-body’s seen this here territory, young Lewis.”

  I nodded, solemn, “Ain’t nobody, Clark. Just us.” I made a sun shield with my flat hand and squinted, slow and dramatic, looking down on the park’s green soccer fields and softball diamond and pearl-gold wildgrass, gleaming in a silent strip of resting sun. Above us the redrock rose sharply upward, right to low clouds; the clouds were infinite, like the glinting light on ocean’s restless swells. “It’s colorful,” I declared. “I’m gonna here name it Co-lor-ado!”

  My Clark-dad clapped one hard loud clap. “You’s brilliant! You’ll have to write that down later, so as you don’ fo-get.”

  I followed him up and down dry hills, declaring all kinds of victory, takin’ note of the deergrass and the newts, up, nearly high as the vast cloud-ceiling, up to the top of Co-lor-ado Springs. From the very top I noticed a faraway green patch. I spoke slowly, still in character, “That thar’s par-dice,” then, again myself, said, “Daddy, look.” I pointed best I could at the patch, emerald in late summer’s golden light.

  He squinted, cupped his brow. His hands were brown from sun. “That’s just a school, Colorado College.”

  The name meant nothing to me, not good or bad, I’d never heard it before. He started to walk back down the bluff’s pale red dust path, and I asked, calling after him, “Like Harvard?”

  But he kept walking. He didn’t answer, and we moved on in silence, me speeding past him, back down the dry red bluffs. Quickly I got ahead, slipped on gravel. “Don’t get hurt,” my dad’s voice called after me, speeding to rejoin me. “Please.”

  The emerald patch was out of view now. I wouldn’t forget it. I’d remember how I’d seen it like a green gemstone.

  When it came time to think about colleges I applied to only one, that Eden glimpsed while hiking with my father: Colorado College.

  CHAPTER 2

  TERRIBLE SEEDS

  Ten years later, my parents flew from Boston out to Colorado to help me settle into the dormitory.

  Going to college here was a fight I’d won; my father thought I could have done better. Now, seated in the backseat of the rental car, I found myself in the beige otherworld of Colorado Springs. It was the paved front range, a vast and continuous strip mall. One grand field of Carl’s Jr.s and Taco Bells and EZ Money Pay Loans and Starbucks, repeating. The streets were straight and wide. It seemed in fashion to have a little American flag fastened to your car’s antenna. This artless red-white-and-blue town was my new home. Liberal me. It made me laugh. I was in the flats. The mountains were out there, somewhere beyond the concrete plains.

  The college was a supposed oasis in the city. The campus itself was verdant, tree-shadowed—a liberal arts school nestled amid the sprawl of this conservative military town. The year before I applied, the Princeton Review ranked us the number 3 reefer school; here weed was more popular than alcohol. Students were attractive and artistic; we could study modern dance and filmmaking; we had galleries. Studio Art was actually a major. The Princeton Review described the school’s vibe as “Intellectual and all-around chill.” Nothing bad should have happened here.

  There’s a story about the start of her college days that Mom used to tell me in my childhood bedroom, as I relaxed into my dreams—a true story. On the second day of my mother’s freshman orientation, at a crowded mixer in the student union, my mom somehow got pushed up against the wall. A boy was pushed up next to her, and they glanced at each other. He said something to her. “It was not romantic like the scene in West Side Story in which Maria and Tony spot each other from across the gym floor,” she would say to me. Sometimes she’d laugh. “We probably talked about where we came from. When the boy said he was from the Bronx, I probably said, ‘My mother was from the Bronx, too.’ I don’t remember if we danced at all. I don’t remember when or if he and I even ever had a formal date.” There are many bits of the story she doesn’t quite remember.

  What my mother does remember is that they would study in adjoining carrels in the university library, which closed each night at eleven o’clock, though freshman girls had to be back in their dorms, safe and sound, by ten. Boys were not allowed in the women’s dorms, except for in the living room areas during certain hours. My mother lived in Capen House, an old Victorian with about twenty freshman girls chaperoned by an old woman, the widow of a professor. After they left the library, the boy would walk her back to the dormitory. Each night she signed in just on time, with a time stamp.

  My mother typed his papers; she did his laundry. They went together for late-night pizza or sometimes ribs and rice at a restaurant named Bobo’s, which was in Ball Square, a short walk away and open late. Some days she brought him food from the dining hall because his parents couldn’t afford the meal ticket. On weekends girls had until midnight before they had to sign in. My mom and the boy used to make out on the roof of the library.

  One night while they were up there above the city, all the lights of Boston wen
t completely black. “We just saw the whole lit city disappear,” she said, and the whole world was just the two of them. The boy was my daddy. That was the story’s punchline.

  On the old library’s roof, in pupil-darkness, my parents made love.

  The next day was The Blackout. “A bunch of guys like Daddy brought out guitars,” and they celebrated in the darkness.

  They were married the night before graduation.

  My mother cleaned my new dorm room with vigor. She got down on her knees and scrubbed the floor, the pale linoleum checkers. The room had already been cleaned by the college and smelled of new plastic mattress cover and bleach, but she washed everything all over again. I only stood and dumbly watched her. She bent over; my father grabbed futilely at her butt—he couldn’t reach—and mumbled something loving, calling her “Arthur Bad,” a bastardization of “awfully bad,” one of their pet names. She darted around us, washed around our feet, sterilizing everything.

  I blinked, lethargic, said half-heartedly, “My room’s already clean, Mom. You can stop washing.” She answered, “But you have allergies,” kept scrubbing, taking care of things for me as she always had.

  I knew there was no point in arguing with her—she had always been deaf to my “No.”

  At sixteen I declared that I would like to dress myself from now on.

  She paused. She said, “You won’t get to school in time.” I couldn’t do it.

  When she still tried to dress me now I’d flinch; I’d say, “Stop it. I’ll do it.” I’d say, “Get the fuck out. I need some privacy.” I would fight her.

  Her behavior wouldn’t change. She would again dress me in my sleep, again; next morning, again. I’d wake; I could say anything. She wouldn’t hear me.

  Mine were hollow words.

  In our arguments, we’d had our typical script. I would say something in protest, she’d say nothing. I’d say, “Did you hear me?” She’d say, “Yes.” She’d turn on NPR if we were in the kitchen or the car, or turn on the faucet and start brushing her teeth. Tomorrow she’d do the same thing—buy more food “for me” than I could possibly eat, dress me for school so I could get there in time, slip in and out of the bathroom freely while I was in the shower.

  I would snap at her; sometimes I’d call her a bitch. Once, I asked her to leave me alone in the bathroom, she didn’t listen, and I scratched her, like a wild cat—furious. I hit her on the breast with an open hand.

  That time she yelled—called me a bitch back. She left the bathroom, but the next day was the same, as if she had forgotten.

  Sometime in middle school, I realized that our dynamic—her helping me put on my clothes, me submitting and allowing it—wasn’t common. I had realized it wasn’t normal—none of my peers needed their mothers to dress them. In all conversations I omitted it. I’d pretend that I dressed myself for school—lying—overcompensating and mentioning how I’d put my shirt on, apropos of nothing.

  I knew I had an embarrassing secret.

  I grew to believe it—I needed her help. I would fail without it. I forfeited myself to this conclusion. This understanding was my greatest shame.

  I began to feel rage—hate for her. Desire to break from her and prove to her, and to the world, and to myself that I was my own valid person.

  When I finally confronted her about her need to control and “handle” things for me, she would say, “I thought I was just being nice.”

  She was adamant: I would be late to school. “Then you’ll have real problems.”

  I felt underestimated. I hated how out of control and powerless I felt.

  Arguing was ineffectual, trying felt pointless.

  Now my dad and I sat together on the dorm-room bed, out of Mom’s way in the small room, feeling useless.

  My dad leafed through my course booklet; he seemed focused. He pointed out one smiling face, a political science professor, and told me he knew him. Before my dad had gone to Harvard Law, he’d studied the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, and he had a whole past there I hardly knew about. I never knew the right time to ask him. I was about to then, but my mom bent down to scoop a mound of my clean clothes into a big black trash bag, and Dad patted her butt, and the moment was over; I just smiled and looked away. I liked seeing that my parents were still so much in love.

  The school had given me a single in a very large newly constructed dormitory, my top choice on the New Student Housing form. I’d fudged the housing questionnaire to make myself seem nocturnal and loud, impossible to live with. I’d never shared a room, and the notion seemed overwhelming.

  Outside my dorm the sky’s pure blue was deepening; day’s light was darkening. My mother hung my fall dresses in the closet, folded my shorts and shirts and underwear and shut them all neatly out of sight. I sat on the vinyl mattress, watching as she separated out a pile of tank tops and cotton panties and tossed them into a fresh black garbage bag.

  “Did we bring too many extra clothes,” I asked, confused. “Are you taking my underwear back home?”

  “No,” she said. “We are going to rewash these pieces of clean clothing together, in order to teach you how to do laundry.” She strode down the hall, and called back at me, “You need to know how to use a washer and a dryer.”

  “Mom no, it’s clean,” I said, following her, unheard.

  As she washed them all again, I didn’t even try to help. She didn’t give me room. I was always in her way. I just wanted her to go. It was time to finally be free of her.

  She handed me four hundred dollars, cash, and a credit card that she and my dad would pay. She looked at me. She was squinting, but her eyes looked at the same time widely opened.

  “What?” I said.

  The dryer rattled. “If a boy tries to give you champagne,” she said slowly, as if she were speaking to a child, as if I were stupid, “he is trying to get you drunk.” She enunciated each word; she had planned to say this.

  I watched the dryer turn. My underwear tumbled over themselves, stuck in their places in the spinning bulk: white, nude, dark cherry red. I said back to her, too loudly, stuck in her unending unrelenting overprotectiveness, “Mom, you’re insane. No one drinks champagne. That doesn’t happen. You’re being crazy. Please can you just leave.”

  She handed me another wad of twenties, squeezed me, and left me.

  It was the last day of August, Sunday the thirty-first, the new school year would begin tomorrow morning. I felt as free as if I were falling. I knew not a single person at Colorado College. I was happily anonymous, liberated from my humiliating past. I felt unbound and defiant. I was determined to prove to my parents—and to myself—that I could take care of myself, once and for all. I could keep myself safe. I didn’t need them. They’d finally see that all their worry about me was needless. Dusk swallowed the stately brick and stone buildings, curled lines of ivy gripped the stone like a giant’s long black fingers, spreading.

  I’d flown to campus from the borderline of California and Oregon only a few days earlier, from a walk along a wild footpath through mountains I’d taken alone in an attempt to shake myself from my mother’s grip.

  I’d first learned about the path at seventeen, when I’d found Travels in Alaska—a brittle and browning, 1979 trade paperback edition of John Muir’s classic—among flat basketballs and insecticide in my family’s garage. When I’d opened it, the spine cracked in two. I felt a swell of compassion for my parents to think that they had bought this wild old book. They had once fostered desire for something distant, something large—a seed they’d buried, abandoned.

  In the weeks after I’d first uncovered the book in the garage, I read it over and over, imagining John Muir writing letters and essays describing the grace of his found-home, so beautiful that even wealthy tourists began to venture out to see. He was an escapee, a pioneer of conservation in a time when industrial production was new and booming. I wanted to know Muir, meet him, catch his joy. Go where
he’d gone. Be as free and euphoric as he was when he was discovering for himself Alaska, glissading, traversing boundless snow, alone. I wanted his life route, his sure footprints to follow instead of those my mother had decided on for me.

  And then I’d learned that I could do just that. His wandering path is marked. A two-foot-wide, 211-mile-long continuous footpath from Happy Isles Trailhead in Yosemite Valley, south through the High Sierra of California, to the summit of Mount Whitney—14,505 feet tall, the highest peak in the lower forty-eight. And this great trail is just a small section of a much longer trail that extends from Mexico to Canada. This long footpath is called the Pacific Crest Trail.

  I decided I had to walk it.

  That summer, I’d lied to my parents, knowing they would never let me go alone—told them that instead of camp I was going to California with some kind of Outward Bound alumni group I’d put together through e-mail—and, by myself, I’d hiked the 211-mile John Muir Trail through the High Sierra Mountains.

  They did find out, they were both worried and my father especially felt terribly betrayed, and the summer I was eighteen, again with their credit card, I returned to California and again hiked the John Muir Trail. This time, I didn’t stop at the John Muir Trail’s northern end but instead kept walking north until my trail converged with a longer wilderness footpath—the Pacific Crest Trail. I kept walking and walking. The summer before college started, I hiked just shy of one thousand miles.

  These summers had been my great rebellion. I’d spent the months before college happy, glowing with my new independence. It was so fucking fun, I was so wildly free. I had wanted to take a gap year and keep going, walk the trail all the way to Canada. I told my mother I was going to, she said no. She said I would be older than everyone at college then, and it would be harder to date. I would be a year behind and too old.

  So I walked one thousand miles and then came to school. I flew straight from Medford, Oregon, to Colorado College. The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow this seeding independence to root in my childhood Eden’s soil and grow until at last it was undeniable.