Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Page 27

  I saw now that bad men existed who would take advantage of any weakness and insecurity they found when violating a victim. I saw it was not my fault; I did not choose to be raped or kidnapped. But now I was learning how to protect myself from predators, to trust my No and my instinct and my strength. I was learning I was not to blame, I couldn’t prevent men from trying to hurt me, but I could definitely fight back. And sometimes fighting back worked.

  The woods were alive—frogs humming, my cells ringing—I stuck my tongue out and felt the power of adrenaline. I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.

  I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself. It felt wonderful to protect myself—to feel growing. To feel how I had changed.

  In the black pool, black night, black forest an inky spill enveloping my small brave wading body—a spot of light—I finally cried.

  I would not be a passive girl.

  I traveled five or six miles, walking then running until I disappeared in night.

  That night when I pitched my tent in dark chilled air, I didn’t put the rainfly on; I was too thoroughly exhausted. I just slept under the mesh and blinking stars, alone again. In the middle of the night it began to rain, and instead of getting out of the tent and clipping the fly on to shelter myself, I only softly smiled and slipped back into sleep, dreamed deeply through it.

  Where the trail ended, I wouldn’t still be a helpless doll girl. I wasn’t trapped within her limitations.

  High in the Marble Mountains; I was only beginning.

  The rain was euphoric for me.

  I awakened in the night shivering; rainfall had stopped. The sky cleared and stars gleamed through thin mist like buttery stains of light diffused by water, it was beautiful, and I decided I’d never let myself be manipulated into danger ever again.

  My walk along the PCT had led me to the place where I could finally see that it was my responsibility to trust myself enough to fight back against dangers I could clearly see. To love myself enough to know I didn’t deserve harm, and to stop blaming myself for it.

  I could see the man with the white truck was dangerous.

  I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.

  I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains—I’d mastered a thousand amazing physical feats—physically I’d become undeniably confident and capable—but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.

  Solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking”; the Latin proverb only seemed half-true. I could walk the height of a country, summit a hundred mountains, cross rivers and borders, and none of it would fix anything real. It doesn’t matter where you’re going. Canada. Colorado College’s green campus. Around Newton Centre. Hiking the PCT was merely a pause button. The trail wasn’t a destination. It was no answer. Walking in solitude fixes nothing, but it leads you to the place where you can identify the malady—see the wound’s true form and nature—and then discern the proper medicine.

  My malady was submission.

  The symptom: my compliance.

  The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

  It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me.

  Moving forward, I wanted rules.

  First—when I felt unsafe I’d leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I’d been bitten—the violation. If I wasn’t interested, I would reject the man blatantly.

  Eighty-five percent of the people who hike the Pacific Crest Trail are male; I’d always known this. I was surrounded by stranger-men. I had believed that immersion in a wilderness of men would heal me. Passively and completely. That I needed only to show up—their omnipresence would desensitize me and cure me of fear. But I saw now it didn’t work that way.

  It worked only one way. If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad—if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law—it would become my law.

  It finally had to.

  I understood that it wouldn’t be easy, it would be very hard; I’d need to resist the habit I had developed long ago—with conviction. I’d have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threats like a Taser gun. I’d stun them. They’d bow to me. I’d let my no echo against the mountains.

  And better to feel bad for a moment saying no—and stop it—than to get harmed.

  I would take better care.

  The small word, no. I’d see its deity.

  Second—I’d take much better care of myself.

  There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired and aching from constant daily pounding, bruised scratched and sometimes rubbed red raw, my weight pressing and pressing them. I decided now that each night in my tent I’d massage them. I would knead them with lotion because they always ached, and at the end of thirty-mile days they burned—and it would be luxurious—something I could have done the entire way because I had been carrying sun lotion but had never taken the ten sacred minutes to do for myself. I bent over myself, down into my soaked-through sleeping bag, and cradled my left foot. I felt my foot’s pulse against my freezing hand’s palm, and exhaled. I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.

  I found my Moleskine notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family—two unsent letters—I wrote: I am the director of my life.

  When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.

  I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.

  It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude.

  I woke to sun, to sky so entirely blue it was blinding, half-conscious in a wonderful new dream. In sleep I’d been reading aloud a story I’d written called “A Hiker’s Guide to Healing”—it was on newsprint—and kids were listening to me—rows of tiny sitting children. They were on a rough blue-gray carpet cross-legged—the light was cold. It was the Cinder-block Palace’s carpet. They were bright-faced on my old motel room’s filthy floor.

  “I’m done,” I’d told them in the dream. “Go outside now.” One of them stood. She was little, with pink lips, cute. She squinted at me. She was trying to see the words.

  “Go outside now,” I repeated, but nobody moved. I looked at the rows of little children sitting, the standing girl, her focused squint and upturned nose. She waved a hand. I pointed at her, asked her, “Yes?”

  She straightened and sprouted inches taller. “What actually are you?” she demanded.

  I handed her the newsprint, grinning. I had written my story, it was an epiphany. “A writer,” I answered.

  I can care for myself, I can care for myself, I can care for myself. I can, I wrote in my soggy notebook. It was a new day, a beautiful one, and I was the director of my life, and I would not get raped today or ever again, and I could care for myself, I could take good care, and my hard no would stop men like a brick to the head, like lead-dead done it was the motherfucking law.

  I can care for myself, I can care for myself, I can care for myself. I fucking can.

  I was promising myself strength.

  I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it.

  I began with the small, constant daily things. Eac
h morning I smeared on the sunscreen I carried, and SPF 15 ChapStick, put a hat on. It was a baby-pink baseball cap that the mobile trail angel Chuck Norris had passed on to me, and I wore it, and for the first time I was protecting myself from getting badly burned.

  At each day’s end, in the emerald shadow of my nylon tent, I cleaned the dirt out from under my fingernails and then drank water, however much I sensed my body needed. For sixteen hundred miles of walking I had been slightly dehydrated, depriving myself of water in my quiet self-destruction, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night parched, gasping. Finally I conscientiously drank, hydrating myself properly.

  I made conscious effort to name my needs and my desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

  If I wanted to go to bed at ten o’clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six P.M., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.

  When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I’d listen to Blood on the Tracks. Dad used to listen to it when he was working out too.

  I only hitched into trail-towns and back with families, couples, and other lone women. In the one-light town of Seiad Valley, a tiny unincorporated community of three hundred people living along the wide slow Klamath River just fifteen miles south of the Oregon border, I acquired luxurious Aveeno lotion. That night, camped beside the shimmering Klamath, listening to it lap, Canadian geese cry and crow, I massaged my shins, my quads and aching feet, fulfilling the tiny new goal I’d committed myself to. It felt excellent, an easy and obvious comfort I finally allowed myself. In town I ate healthier, fresh fruit and vegetables and no more Ben & Jerry’s, retraining my taste buds, in preparation for life after the trail.

  In northern-most California I stepped from pine forest into pine forest. It was beautiful in a gentle repetitive way, a kaleidoscope of dead red pine needles littering the trail, huckleberries the frosted color of summer plums, fields of pocked white pumice stones and clear dark azure lakes: it was virgin.

  I still chose to call my mother every night, taking care of her, too.

  A week later, at a library in town, I would go online and check the fund-raising Web page I’d set up through RAINN, expecting nothing, and see that she had donated $1,060 to help rape victims.

  I also saw, written in bold-faced gray: the school where I’d been raped, where I’d been silenced, had donated $752.00 to RAINN in my honor. After all—they’d believed in my integrity.

  I was crossing a grassy clearing in the trees, nearing the Oregon border, when I saw another hiker. I felt lonesome, and so when he grinned, flapped a hand manically and jogged to me, I took his eagerness as friendly, not threatening.

  But then he perfectly wrecked it. He called me “cutie” and almost immediately called me “frisky.” He was going to walk with me, and said that then that night we could “hang out.” “You’re liking having a fun time,” this strange man told me.

  I sensed he was feeling for my boundary, making a bold advance. I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine I had done something to suggest that I might ever sleep with him. I hadn’t had sex with anyone on this trail but Icecap, and only once. I’d believed that maybe if I ignored them, never proved them, the rumors would dissipate. They wouldn’t. Instead they would spread like ink in cold water, curling, enwrapping me—staining me. It was impossible for me not to feel the power of their mark, its endurance. I couldn’t clear it. I felt my value obscured by it. Men who saw it couldn’t see me.

  I looked at him in his dark blue eyes and told him flatly that I was a virgin, and that he was scaring me, confusing me.

  I passed him without another word. He let me go, his eyes averted.

  I’d lied to him, wishing it were true.

  I walked alone, sometimes seeing lumbering strangers, heavy weekend campers, sometimes hiking days with myself purely.

  About two weeks after I’d escaped the man with the truck, a guy who had heard rumors about me propositioned me. I said no to him immediately, urgently.

  I was hiking swiftly, three months into a very long walk, taking great care of my strong body, obliterating oppressive compliance and, with it, my longstanding dread of men. Alone I’d walked one thousand miles—Upper Crabtree Meadow to this northwoods pine forest, the trees’ bark the dark bluish gray shade of sharks, dry stringy lime green moss frilling them like wild mold. I was strong. I was fit and independent—able to care for myself, to handle myself. I felt powerful and elated: empowered. Truly happy. I was at last in control, and—just like that—hiking this trail had actually become fun.

  Feeling the presence of my own power was fun.

  Though I did keep one crutch. Rather than stating flatly, “I’m not interested,” I sometimes answered by lying, telling them I was a virgin. I shielded myself with the word. In the moment of threat, I felt that the most important thing was to stop the man, and saying I was a virgin was a quick means to that end. Virgin had become the word to tell them: You Are Wrong About Me. I thought the lie was harmless. I hated that I lied, but felt I had no better way to regain control.

  I’d feared that simply saying no without also refuting the rumors would leave some men bitter; they’d grow hateful and harm me later, as Never-Never had—or they’d persist. I feared men wouldn’t respect my no alone. I had spent a lifetime having my no ignored.

  It was a lie born from the fear that I was inaudible.

  One by one I told each of the male hikers no. Just as I’d told Icecap. One by one they listened to me and backed off.

  It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.

  The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE DIRECTOR OF MY LIFE

  I felt something hurting on the cheek of my behind, discovered a tiny scab. It was dime size, rippled and rough. I was in northern-most California, finally just miles from crossing the wooded border. It was only a tiny little raised bump. I decided it was insignificant; I should ignore it. For the next twelve hours, I did.

  But the sore spread; slowly at first, then faster. I felt weak, but then I rationalized that I always kind of felt weak. But soon it was fist size. Then the raised area was palm size, wet with clear pus, rapidly growing. A doctor I met beside the trail, sitting around a midday campfire with his buddies, listened as I described it—I wasn’t going to expose my rear to him—and told me that I’d developed a staph infection, “Nothing urgent.” The doctor was out for a week in the woods; how lucky, I thought. It was no big deal, now I knew.

  But I didn’t allow myself to consider he might be wrong, that the rough raised skin was the first mark of something far more harmful, the beginnings of an infection that can grow fatal. I had walked 1,700 miles, and now all I felt was weak. The wound was devastatingly painful, becoming impossible to ignore—it wasn’t healing. It was growing. It began to feel undeniably urgent; soon even the slightest contact with my shorts shot a searing pain through my entire body. I couldn’t sit. And still it grew.

  I couldn’t keep on going this way. I was nearly to Oregon, just miles from crossing, but I couldn’t manage to step another step.

  I called my mother. She told me through the sat phone, “You need to come home.” She was crying, her hysteria annoyed me. Her sobs were rhythmic.

  The last place I wanted to go was her home. I brushed my hand over the seat of my spandex, and winced. The infection was tender and shockingly hot. It seemed to produce its own heat. “It’s getting a little better, I think,” I lied then hung up, cutting her shrill yelling short.

  It wasn’t getting better, though. Discoloration was spreading like blood on water, seep
ing deeper, red flesh tender and soft as fruit rot, the dried blisters flaking, falling away. That night I had to sleep on my stomach or my left side, atop instead of inside my sleeping bag, despite night’s cold, as pressure on—any contact with—the blistered splotch was piercing. I shivered through my half-sleep, wishing I could wrap myself up in my fluffy sleeping bag, which lay beside me, warm, beckoning, taunting, useless. At last, shaking with cold, frost crystals glittering on my tent’s arched roof, I tried to drape it over myself; it grazed my behind. My heart rate shot up, the pain a shock. I gasped. The spot burned as if pressed onto blue stove flames.

  The next morning I deconstructed my tent, screaming out as my cotton shorts brushed against the rash, in so much pain, breathing deeply, swallowing. I continued along the trail north, stepping slowly, my soft pink cotton shorts suddenly hell to wear, swooshing against me, abrading the rash, dust puffing up, stinging it, each step excruciating. When I came to a junction with a side-trail marked with a sign, Trailhead ] 2 Miles, I followed it, not caring where it went. I really could not go on.

  I limped two dusty, rocky miles downhill to a gravel trailhead parking lot, angling myself to minimize right-tush-cheek-shorts contact, at times lifting my cotton shorts with my fingers, exposing the rash and my white rear to cool fresh wind. At the lot I waited, standing then lying on my stomach on my sleeping pad.

  At last a jovial lady day-hiker returned to her van and gave me a ride to an urgent care clinic in Yreka. I thanked her. I could hardly see her, squatting in her car, hovering, my thighs and quads burning, shaking, then sitting, blinded by the pain. The clinic’s doctor flicked off the lights and examined my behind under a blacklight, told me, “Terrible fluid.” He gave me an antifungal ointment to rub onto the hot raised area, capsule antibiotics to swallow three times daily—I’d have to, I would.

  I took a hitch with a young woman out toward Ashland, Oregon, the next town through which the trail would pass, hoping to rest while my hot rash got better. I’d stayed in Ashland nearly a year ago, at the end of my one-thousand-mile walk before beginning college.