Girl in the Woods Read online

When I told her again in person, we were in the all-you-can-eat dining hall, having a wordless dinner. She was eating a bright plate with greens and beets from the local section of the salad bar. She had tried to make me one, too, but I had said no. I swallowed French fries with ketchup and chocolate cake with white soft-serve ice cream on top. She watched me. She’d never seen me eat like that.

  I had gained ten pounds. She could see. She said so. She said, “You’ll lose it on the trail, plus more. So you can eat however you want.”

  I looked up at her. So she was letting me go. It seemed impossible, remarkable.

  She repeated again, again, again that I would lose it.

  The next day we packed. In my ruined room my mother lunged from task to task, dried-out book to crusty mug, frantic, cleaning. Taking care of things.

  In the hallway’s hollow gray light I looked down at my belongings: clothing, plastic flip phone and its charger, laptop, all of my shoes. My things entirely blocked the hallway out.

  I left a whole dorm room full of stuff and took only candy and Make Me Blush lipstick and myself.

  It would be another year before I learned that what happened to my room was not caused by rain—the rain was merely a coincidence. The water that filled my room was not rain but waste. A sewage pipe had burst.

  My mother took me to the R.E.I. on Colorado Springs’s outskirts, and loaded the cart up with heavy unbreakable Nalgene branded water bottles, mittens, fleece hats she wanted to buy me—and I unloaded them all. On family backpacking trips my backpack had weighed half as much as I had. My parents wore gigantic backpacks, fifty pounds each at least, so heavy they’d be bent forward under the bulk. My dad had a bad back now. On this walk, I would carry none of that. I unloaded it all.

  My mother stiffened, startled. Her eyes were open, huge and frantic. “They’re water bottles, Debby,” she said. “You’ll need water?”

  “No, fuck,” I said. I was rude. “Just no.” I told her thru-hikers use Gatorade bottles. Nalgenes are unnecessarily heavy. The backpack I insisted I wanted was a tiny neon green nylon knapsack.

  Of course she didn’t understand. She refilled the cart with everything I’d unloaded and bought it all, even as I insisted I would carry none of it.

  We stayed back in my grandparents’ ranch house, and my mom cooked for me; she’d cleaned up all my things, everything wrecked. I needed a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. She bought it for me. She took complete care of me. Yet she never asked how I was feeling, how I was coping, if the rape was screwing with my mind and self-image, if a mute space had formed in my head. I focused on a raindrop stuck on the side of a rusty pole, or my damp gray shoelaces.

  I slept in the old house’s basement; it was cool and smelled like turpentine and clay, it was drafty like a tornado shelter, wind knocking hard desert shrubs against the high strips of filthy window. A thousand trinkets, backyard’s mint plants spreading like kindly weeds. The dirt in the yard smelled dank and sweet, of red rock, red clay, dust, thundershowers, childhood. That would be my last night in Colorado.

  My mother drove me to the airport, told me, “Daddy will be waiting at the gate.” He was using his vacation days to drive me to Mexico. It would be a father-daughter road trip to the border.

  I told her this sounded good. I didn’t ask her why she’d said nothing comforting back when, months before, I’d said: Mom, that’s rape.

  I landed in Los Angeles wearing my small knapsack filled with trail mix and granola bars and chocolate and cheese, an ultralight tent, sleeping bag and sleeping pad. My face was hot from crying in the air, my cheeks taut with dried tears. My dense pack was heavy and unwieldy on me, pulling me side to side. I swayed under it.

  My father was at my gate, as promised. He looked smaller, stood leaning forward, crooked, in the car sat artificially straight as if he had been given an order he could not defy. He had slender limbs and a firm bulge of a gut, a curly mess of greasy mud black hair. Green eyes and puffy lips. Looking at him, I saw his lips were mine, my slender fingers his too. I saw myself in him, how far I was from him.

  In the car we didn’t talk much. We referred to my sadness, never “rape.”

  We stopped in San Diego, not on the way, but my dad thought it would be nice to see the water. We parked by a big and busy beach. Lots of surfers. I remember the sun, red at its center, golden white along its rim.

  Swimmers bobbed in the water, their little heads dipping and rising and dipping, black shadows against that big red sun. The water looked drugged: black shot with pink and the silver you see in game shows.

  My dad and I walked out, out a half mile at least into the ocean on a concrete jetty. We had squeezed through a gap in a chain-link fence, ignored a sign that said: Stop. Do Not Walk High Tide. Was it high tide? We weren’t sure. The jetty was twenty feet wide at least and plain concrete like a flat sidewalk over the ocean, God knew how far out.

  We just went.

  We both noticed the water climbing up and up, our distance from the massive black surface shrinking. But we kept walking out. The flat, wide concrete disappeared. It looked like we were walking on water.

  When the water splashed at our ankles, we turned back.

  The rising ocean thick under our stepping shoes. The concrete no longer visible, only trackable by feel. With one long step—I’d thought I had been walking cut-blade straight—I raised a foot and dropped it off the edge. Fell back onto the jetty, soaking myself. My heart rushing. I was a five-minute run from the beach. If I’d stepped off all the way I could have drowned.

  My father gasped, paused over me, gave me a hand up, and strode with me, pushing water, at my side.

  We were almost swimming.

  The rest of the way back I dragged my rubber shoe sole along the concrete corner-edge often, remembering it was there, remembering it was there. We made it back on land in a surge of adrenaline, in silence, the ocean lapping at our calves.

  For dinner that night my dad and I went to an Italian restaurant at the bottom of a flight of big stone stairs. It felt fancy, but we were in a basement. Dad laid out for me the conditions of this walk. He explained that Mommy had a satellite telephone for me. I had to lean in to hear him. He said that it would work in desert, on remote glaciers, in Africa—anywhere—and Mommy would mail it to the post office in Warner Springs, the first little town the PCT would pass through, out in the Anza-Borrego Desert. It had cost my parents $1,500, so I should keep it protected in a waterproof bag. With it, I would be able to call my parents and report to them my GPS coordinates nightly, no matter what.

  This was their only requirement. They would pay for my gear, mail me new running shoes to remote post offices along the trail, boxes of trail-food to far-off places, continue to pay off the credit card they’d given me for college. All I had to do was call them. Could I do that for them? I could, of course, Daddy.

  I’d never slept in a room alone with my dad before that trip, and I felt his desperation, how desperately he wanted to keep me safe, to be my keeper, but that wasn’t his job anymore. He was going to leave me in the desert. That was the only job for him now.

  I knew leaving me at Mexico’s edge would pain him. I didn’t care.

  Morning light glared like a spotlight on my face in my hotel bed. I blinked awake. Dust spun in the hot light, my hair was damp with sweat. Even in this clamorous air-conditioning. Outside must have been smoldering. I felt out of shape and lethargic, gently rocked my whole body, gaining enough oomph to sit up. I felt drained of energy. The desert sprawls from the Mexico border to the southern edge of the High Sierra Mountains—702 parched sun-scorched miles. It was dusty and expansive. I was in no shape to walk across it. But I was sitting up. Then, standing.

  My dad was still sleeping, breathing deeply, his lips parted. My pack sat, open, gaping, empty of the eleven pounds I’d fill it with.

  In the hotel room’s bathroom, my dad still snoring, I stripped naked. My body was too pasty. I’d grown to hate it. It was time to dress myself in th
e clothing I would walk in.

  I stepped into pink cotton Soffe shorts. I wasn’t wearing underwear. I’d abandoned underwear eight months earlier, the morning after Junior had raped me. He had yanked them off me and so, the next morning breaking, in my little stall, I had yanked them off myself. I hadn’t worn them since.

  I pulled on socks, running shoes, laced them. I hooked my bra. I hated sports bras, they smushed breasts and made me feel at once confined and fat, and so I would hike in something I felt better in—a new wire-supported bra I’d found in a mall in Colorado Springs, at Victoria’s Secret. It was lilac satin, a tiny white silk bow at the front clasp. I’d feel prettier in it. Then I pulled on a black long-sleeved half-cotton, half-synthetic running shirt, covering it. Put on a baseball cap from Jacob’s old college team. In my pack I had a picture of Jacob on a baseball field, his stately profile. It would be the only photograph I carried.

  Finally, I put on my prescription sunglasses. I’d worn glasses since third grade, each new year’s pair thicker than the last, the glass distorting my huge child-eyes. With the glasses, the little compliments my mom would give me about my eyes became rare. My dad would sometimes say, sweetly teasing, “Let me see what you look like in your contact lenses,” and I would take my glasses off, and he would say, “Looks good!” I would stand like that, holding my glasses awkwardly, not putting them down, walking around clumsily bumping into things, until after a minute, every time I would have to put them back on.

  He’d sometimes tell me, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” The verse was from a Dorothy Parker poem, and I used to think it was written by my grandma, my dad’s mother, because she was Dorothy Parker, though her name was only a coincidence.

  I grew to see glasses as unattractive.

  I understood: if I could only wear contacts, I would look better. Until I could learn to touch my eyes, I feared I would never be seen in the way I might have been.

  Now, instead, I looked at myself through the dark lenses. I would only carry the one pair—tinted—so that no one would know they were prescription.

  I had the sense that something was missing. I looked like a girl ready to jog to a soccer scrimmage, not like a trans-country backpacker. Not like I was setting off to hike 2,650 miles through mountainous wilderness, alone. The only items of clothing I would take with me that I wasn’t wearing were black spandex leggings and a fleece-lined wool hat.

  Dressed in everything I thought I needed, I kneeled on the milk-colored carpet and transferred songs from my chunky white laptop on to my iPod. Songs were light. I added album after album I had loved. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ben Folds, Springsteen—but mostly Dylan. Albums uploaded quickly, more than a thousand songs. Songs weigh exactly nothing. I could carry all the ones I wanted to hear.

  I added “Mississippi,” “Moonlight,” “Hurricane.” I added “Date Rape” by Sublime, in which the rapist gets eternally anally raped in prison for what he did—the judge “knew he was full of shit”—a modern sort of ballad.

  I hummed to myself. I was trying to stop hearing my dad’s soft snoring.

  There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes.

  At the Tijuana-California border, my father filled my empty Gatorade bottles with water from a big jug he’d bought in San Diego. They were a liter each, and I had five of them, as in the desert the air was dry and hot and water would be scarce. I sat on the minivan trunk and ate cold pizza left over from the night before in the candlelit Italian basement, took big bites too fast, my dad still filling up every water bottle I had.

  He hugged me. I held him back, hopping awkwardly down. He had to leave me now. I would stay. It was what I had wanted. It was time.

  My father started the rental car. He drove up the dirt road, north, away, his dust trail hanging, fully obscuring him. I was at Mexico’s edge, alone, my own master, and the sky was boundless and empty and so intensely blue, sunspots deep red in my vision, my eyes straining to see better.

  A big sandstone monument marked the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. The path looked unexceptional, just a three-foot-wide rut snaking through the dust, over a sandy hill and out of my range of vision. This was the beginning of something almost unending. I stepped down it.

  Instead of walking, I ran. North along the dusty trail. I was out of shape and knew that my fast pace was not sustainable, but I wanted to get north fast, to get somewhere, and so I ran fast then slow then fast again—fiercely unsure—like a scared kid fleeing a house I suddenly hated.

  The trail was marked with rusty signs. Scattered insects and reptiles basked in the sun. I felt I’d discovered a tiny unknown country: hills of dust like open ocean’s swells.

  The most gorgeous views appeared in rows like windows into my history. My vision seemed to brighten fiercely, as if it had awoken fully. Sunlit desert, uneven mountains in the distance. The ground I walked on was dried mud, cracked intricately like a window shattered but still intact. Touch it, and it would collapse to dust.

  The bottles my father had filled felt heavy, the water still cool from CVS air-conditioning. I paused and unscrewed the top of one of the bottles, took a swig, wiped my full girlish lips, and tipped it and poured it out into the dust. The thread of water falling caught the sun like a band of silver as it slipped to the dry ground. The dirt was so dry and packed that it couldn’t absorb the water. It beaded and then pooled up, lying in a small depression like a plate of sun. I poured out the next one, and then the next one, until my five liters had become just two.

  Because this is what I knew: The first water source on my path was Hauser Creek, a small creeklet sixteen miles up the trail. It was one thirty in the afternoon, sun high and hot, air dry, ground dry and white as chalk. Now I had to walk sixteen miles through the desert to Hauser Creek. It wasn’t a choice any longer. It was what I had to do now not to die.

  I was running, faster. The notion of running to Canada from Mexico was ridiculous, I knew that, but then of course the notion of walking to Canada from here was almost equally ridiculous. It was all ridiculous. I was on a journey to solve a problem that had no solution. Matted, dirty hair and sunburn and sore quads—and deprivation—would be fun for a weekend, but this was a lifestyle. I’d chosen to be homeless for five months, to live in a tent, to be filthy and lonely. I couldn’t walk off the rape, my brother’s callous questioning, my mother’s long deafness. My over-loving mother had become a wall. My easy road had become the Pacific Crest Trail. My soft pink feet would become callouses, my soles would harden, they’d feel no tenderness as they stepped.

  I could go someplace gorgeous where nobody knew me and start over. I might feel something there, even if that thing were burning, blistered feet. I wanted to walk the whole great trail, this trail, tip to distant tip. The path unfolded beneath my stepping feet.

  I would walk it until it faded in the mist and lush of northern Washington, then ended. I would walk the height of the country. I would walk off my fat, my sadness, the year of my rape. The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DANGERS OF THE DESERT

  Sunspots blotted my vision. The desert was white as light and boundless. The sky limitless. No birds. Not one smoky puff of cloud. Though I had the crazy sense that I was being watched.

  In the bends of crossing trails, tangled in bushes and in the bases of sharp yucca, empty chip bags and soda bottles and candy bar wrappers quivered in the death-heat, catching the sun, not yet sun-faded. This trash was fresh. I’d imagined I’d be out here alone, yet clearly people had eaten at this spot, and recently. Then I noticed, slung on a cactus right beside me, two pairs of border booties—homemade shoe sleeves made of cut-up old carpets that obscure illegal immigrants’ shoe prints in the dust. Like an inexplicable shadow on the bedroom wall, the trash triggered mirages of unseen danger. Like my fallen plastic button. Evidence of some other presence.

 
; Then out down the bone-white path I noticed a figure moving slowly—a man. He was breathing hard, nearing me—no, only just a boy. He looked about fourteen. His brown hair flop-flopped on the back of his neck; he twisted to more clearly see me. I stopped and stood still to see him better too, and he stared and kissed the air at me and then walked right off of the trail, out, into the spiny plants and boundless dust of open desert. No one was with him. He was carrying nothing.

  We were about seven miles north of the border, and I wondered if he knew where he was headed. My own long dusty path looked straight and led out into open desert. The established trail was frightening enough. The boy was smaller now, again a brown speck. I really hoped this boy would make it okay.

  I stared down the footpath, pale dust rising in the infinite sunlight. The trail didn’t end. I stepped by more carpet booties, tossed off like plaster masks after a masquerade. I felt unsafe. There were people near me, I was sure, but I couldn’t see them. I passed a yellow square sign, like a road sign: “¡Cuidado! No exponga su vida a los elementos. ¡No vale la pena!”

  There was no English translation, but I could tell that it said: “Warning! Do not expose your life to the elements. Not worth it!”

  And there was an illustration of a sun, a cactus, a rattlesnake, and water waves in a circle with a slash through them: no water. These were the dangers of the desert, and people confront them and sometimes die on their journeys to live in this country. I thought then of the stories I would have to someday tell my own children: dropping out of college, raped. Self-exiled, walking across the desert. I felt in a hotspot in my gut that I might be a dropout, ever after.

  A sole cloud drifted like a balloon; the sun blinked. In shadow I saw the dry hills more clearly. I could enter this gorgeous world where nobody knew me and start over. The path unfolded beneath me, and I followed it, jogging, faster, smelling the dust, feeling the sunshine heating my dry cheeks, legs, burning, burning.