Girl in the Woods Read online

  “And you’re a dumb fucking cunt,” he said. He grinned.

  I didn’t respond to Edison and planned to camp that night somewhere where he was not.

  One month later to the day a marine AH-1W Super Cobra helicopter would crash on that exact spot of desert, and two men would die. The debris would scatter, strike the canyon like shrapnel and leave in the white sage and yucca packs of unexploded rockets. The United States government would close this section of the trail, ten hazardous miles.

  Under a field of clouds we followed the canyon’s rim, walked in and out of canyons, deep drainages, most of them dry. Brown, parched ridges sloped down to green cleavages; the green was poison oak. The trail was good, flat. We hiked in deep Us, just level, never climbing to the dried ridge or descending into the bushes threaded with poison. I thanked the trail for its kind route.

  Daniel talked specifically to me. He asked me about my college. He wanted to know if I was “a happy girl.” His questions were generic, he wasn’t entirely fluent, but I could sense what he was trying to gauge was: can this girl be mine?

  Which absolutely shocked me. Daniel was an athlete, he seemed popular and graceful, yet when I spoke he listened and he smiled. He was trying to make me like him. I wondered why he couldn’t see I was a weird fat dirty mess, maybe his limited language blocked him from noticing. Maybe he was just happy and friendly to everyone. But I saw how he disregarded Edison, stiffening a shoulder, gracefully muting him, leaning toward me. It seemed crazy, but I sensed that he liked me.

  We talked about Texas. He had lived there as an exchange student for one year. I’d never been there. He’d never liked it. He wanted to know names of United States places I liked. I told him, “Yellowstone.” I told him, “Boston’s nice.” I parted my lips to say “Colorado” but quickly closed them, pressed them against each other tight.

  “That is right,” he said, to all the things I said.

  Sometime during those green poisonous miles, Daniel had become sweet to me. There was something that he saw in me that he wanted. He wanted to walk with me, spend time with me, maybe he even wanted to kiss me.

  And I felt happy. And as the miles unfolded, even my hate and fear of Edison subsided. He tried to engage me with friendly questions; what food did I most crave? What candy was I craving the worst? I ignored him. I discounted him, and though he had been reckless, eventually he only seemed pathetic. The less I looked his way, the more he wanted my approval.

  I thought maybe it’d be okay to camp where he camped, after all.

  That night we three stopped at PCT mile thirty-eight—I’d hiked twenty-two miles, that day. I wasn’t tired. I was absolutely wired. We set up our separate tents under that shadow-sky and I climbed into mine—“Night, guys.”

  DAY 3, THE DESERT, CALIFORNIA, MILES 38–53

  I awoke that next morning to Daniel’s voice, low and tender, his silhouette against my tent wall, speaking. “Wild Child, this is the morning. Hey? You are awake for hiking?”

  My hand lay on my stomach and I pressed it there firm, eyes still shut. “Yup, thanks,” I said back, my morning voice gravelly like a teenager’s. “Getting up.”

  Outside my tent the sky was blue, the sun already distant from the horizon. It was eight o’clock.

  We walked in silence that morning—I could think of nothing to say—and I wondered what Daniel and Edison thought of me, if they liked me. If they could sense my anger, blankness. Or not.

  The terrain that morning was abnormal, strange for this southern latitude. We crossed a creek, entered the trail’s first forest: fir and pine. We walked through the forest—good shade and new dark soil—and then out of it. At mile 42, we emerged onto a paved road, the first we’d seen, to a long wooden building: Laguna Mountain Lodge.

  We left our packs on the steps. Inside, the general store had coke and ice cream. I bought a pint of vanilla and a can of whipped cream to eat out on the porch’s precious shade. Paying the cashier for my sugar, I noticed a thick book with the seductive title Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills.

  The ancient, tweed-suited Hispanic man working the tiny store’s register saw I was looking at it, and he told me, “That should be the bible for you kids.” It was a battered hardcover book, worn soft and rounded at its corners. I flipped through it, spooning my ice cream thoughtlessly, reading, stopping at a list that seemed important. Clearly, calmly and with authority, it named the “big ten” items no hiker can do without:

  1.Map

  2.Compass

  3.Sunglasses and sunscreen

  4.Extra food

  5.Extra water

  6.Extra clothes

  7.Headlamp/flashlight

  8.First-aid kit

  9.Fire starter

  10.Knife

  This list seemed reasonable, and it made my chest tighten, and I swallowed, ice cream chilling my throat. The cashier told me something else, but I didn’t quite make it out.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You didn’t look like most hikers who come through.”

  Rather than ask him to tell me why not, I felt a hot jolt of fear, shut the book and walked out, fleeing the list and the man, unfinished.

  He called after me to say I should be carrying a gun.

  For the rest of our first full day together, we discussed girls, past relationships. Sex. Somehow it seemed necessary, pressing, even, to know where we’d all been. Where we were at.

  Daniel said he “had had love;” he even told her “love you.” He didn’t have much to say about her, though. “She has a big heart.” “Her sisters they have many kids.”

  Edison’d never had a girlfriend, but he’d hooked up shitloads.

  “Like sex?” I asked.

  I don’t remember what his answer was, but I remember I doubted he’d done much. I guessed he was a virgin.

  When we took a break a few hours later, Daniel pulled out a wallet photo. “Zis is her,” he said. He handed Edison the picture.

  It was a mocha-skinned black girl, maybe seventeen. Lovely.

  “She has a big heart,” Daniel said.

  Edison tapped her butt with his finger, tossed it back at him. “Big booty, you mean. Boo-tay-licious.”

  I picked it up from the dirt where it’d landed, looked at the girl’s dark eyes and perfect teeth. It was a high school picture-day photo, awkwardly posed. Her skin was flawless, glowed like clear sky.

  “You fuck her?” Edison asked. His voice was quiet, almost reverent, a tone I hadn’t heard from him.

  “I never did that,” Daniel said.

  North of the Mount Laguna store-diner-post office, the trail stays high, follows the Lagunas’ uneven ridge. A vertical mile below, the Anza-Borrego Desert lies, a beige wasteland, waterless and baking. The air five thousand feet down over the desert floor shimmers, distorted by heat. Shallow badlands erode, slope down to flat, shrubless dirt too hot to touch. Dust haze hangs like smog, softens the dunes, rippling to the horizon. Beige against blue. On and on. We would not, today, descend into the Anza-Borrego’s beige inferno; for another thirty-two miles we’d stay high, skirt the mountain spine’s sharp edge, view the desert’s lunar beauty from above. I was relieved that for now we’d remain cooler, high and safer. At this elevation oaks and incense cedars grow in clusters, and we walked in and out of the harsh sun, loved the gaps of cool. Endured the flashes of bright heat. I saw a ladybug in flight, that tiny red vibration in the air by my swinging arm. You can wish on ladybugs; I made a wish: I’d not get hurt.

  We got water 0.1 mile off the trail to the east at Oasis Spring; the water was cold and delicious; I wished all water could taste that good. I chugged and chugged. I felt revived. I drank two liters and filled them back up to carry. We walked past sugar pines, Jeffrey pines’ great red trunks. They smelled like butterscotch. Brown clouds like exhaust puffs polluted the sky, blotted out the sun. One puff glowed, backlit. Pure gold. I listened to my iPod as we strode—the Red Hot Chili Peppers, eight songs replaying. I felt tra
nquil. Yet energized. Off on an adventure with a team.

  We camped a little early that night—only hiked about 14.4 miles that day—because we were, all three of us, inexplicably tired. We all wanted to stop. This night would be the first night of Kickoff, and we were officially missing it, 32.7 trail-miles too far north. I felt a pang of regret. We set up our separate tents that brown-sky evening on the dead grass at Pioneer Mail Trailhead and filled our Gatorade bottles from a concrete water tank beside an oak tree. It had no lid, was open to rain and rodents. A metal sign stuck to it read: Non-Potable Water for Horses Only.

  I leaned over the top and saw in the water a dead mouse floating. I didn’t say anything. We had to drink it. The next reliable water would be 24.9 miles north.

  My mother overstated the dangers of the world—invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.

  It wasn’t that my mother’s fears were outlandish. People do die of infection, of cancerous moles left to mutate, and of pneumonia (it starts as a common flu) and mad cow disease. Children on bikes get hit by cars. She did not fear wild boar attacks or an alien invasion. The things she feared were theoretically possible. Horrible. But statistically as improbable as a flipped coin landing standing on its slim rim.

  Ten thousand times less probable than rape.

  I took a swig of the contaminated water. We sat down with a few thru-hikers we’d just met at a picnic table, talking, sipping our water slowly, as if small sips would combat the chance of disease, when suddenly it began to rain. It was abrupt and shocking, the smell of desert dust rising. Daniel looked at the gray-blue sky, to me, asked: “To my tent, yes?”

  Wordlessly Edison and I followed him to his well-built tent’s taut rainfly.

  We pulled off our smelly running shoes and slipped them into the tent’s tiny vestibule. I climbed inside. “It’s nice in here.”

  We sat there dry under the deafening rain, making bad jokes, asking each other too-private things. But what did we really know about each other? Did I really know Daniel’s plans, his path to the southern tip of the Pacific Crest Trail? There was so much I still didn’t know.

  And I gave the men half-truths. “Jacob and I are super close. My other brother Robert’s like the mayor of Newton,” I told them. It was true only that Robert was running in the election, and Jacob had once been my closest friend.

  I can say I did know by then that Daniel was an athlete, one of the top downhill mountain bike racers in Switzerland until he got injured, he hadn’t said how. I knew he’d lived a year in Anaheim, Texas, as an exchange student in high school. That’s where he’d met that girl in the picture. I knew he hated fat people.

  “I’m fat,” I’d said, back at the picnic table.

  “No.” I could see the muscle harden in his cheeks. “No. You are not.”

  I had been joking kind of, and his hard response surprised me. But then it made me feel good. He was certain of what I was and what I wasn’t. I wasn’t fat. I felt that he liked me.

  Now in his orange-lit tent, my folded body only inches from pressing into his, I felt him looking at me again in exactly the intent way he had back on the golden field—determined. Unapologetically, happily watching. It was strange to suddenly be so close to him in the small shelter of a tent; in the wide wilderness of these days our forms had endless space, but bent over together in the little tent our arms and legs made heat. I could smell his sweat and sunscreen. I felt his eyes on me, even as he talked to Edison. Edison had no face, his name didn’t matter. I felt only Daniel’s eyes.

  I kept my eyes ahead, pretending to study his vestibule’s fine mesh, a little giddy, willing myself not to flush fiercely.

  Then I felt his skin. It was sudden, he skimmed my arm carelessly, easily. He was chatting with Edison, stirring me, I was burning. Edison had entirely vaporized. His hip shifted closer to mine; now we were subtly and fully touching. I looked at him finally, and I could feel the electricity between our limp arms.

  I boldly called him Icecap instead of his name.

  He looked solemn.

  “You’re Icecap. Like?” I needed to be the one to give him his trail name.

  He looked so serious. “For me, yes,” he finally said. He nodded slowly.

  “Okay yes,” I said too.

  Outside parched desert plants were dark, erased by night and quivering in rain getting soaked. I listened to the drops fall on the tent, feeling the patter’s small vibrations, Icecap’s warm breath, body heat, the hard hip of the boy beside me, stirring me.

  I would call him Icecap thereafter always—it fit him because he wore a white cap, and because he was from the snow-capped mountains in Switzerland, and because he seemed quiet and intense and lovely. The boy who raced until he got too hurt. Icecap. It would become his trail name, the person he’d be to me.

  Wind pressed against the tent—we heard a tree crack and, through the gap between the rainfly and the ground, saw a snapped branch swaying—and we said good-night, and I climbed out, ran to my tent.

  In my tent I lay still. I was damp from my sprint back and cold and inexplicably wet—turned on. My nipples were chilled and stiff. My palm against my hip bone, fingers tucked under the elastic waistband of my shorts. Thinking of Daniel’s eyes on me on Kickoff’s golden field. His hand brushing over my wrist lightly back in his tent. How the touch had thrilled me. I replayed the quick slip of his fingers. The adrenaline flood of an imagined kiss. Lying there dry under the deafening rain, I imagined Daniel—Icecap—on his bike flying downhill, the flooding adrenaline and swell of joy.

  I saw him crashing.

  I felt an ache of compassion and wondered if he had had to crash before he walked this trail. I thought about the risks we were sharing; all the hostile things we would survive together.

  In the middle of the night Icecap’s voice woke me. The rain had stopped. I could feel the wind chill through the tent wall; he told me everyone was up, awake. In a hiker named Chopper’s tent. Chopper and Savior. They were brothers.

  We were all going to smoke weed.

  I twisted my feet into my shoes and clicked my headlamp on and followed Icecap’s light into the blackness.

  I smelled the weed at least a hundred yards from the lit tent. I thought to myself: I should do this. I should smoke this weed to get over a low feeling, to create a new association. I would do it; nothing bad would happen. No harm would befall me, not out here. I tried to fully believe it. The air was clear and cold. I hadn’t smoked since the night I was raped. I felt that memory heavy like an uncomfortable sweater against me. White smoke hung around the tent like a ring of dissipated ghosts, unbound but pausing.

  I climbed in; the smoke inside drifted slowly, each curl fading into the lamp-lit haze. It took a minute to see through the lit white air people’s faces. Someone passed me the joint. I put it to my lips, inhaled.

  “Quit nigger-lipping it.” That was Edison. I smiled. I held it out and a large guy took it.

  I watched his masculine jaw, his hulking chest-silhouette expand and drop as he sucked in, breathed out smoke. His hair was cut short, a flat crew cut, and he looked half American Indian. And military. This would be Chopper.

  I said hi to him, to Chopper, to the other faces in the tent that I could hardly see. “Thanks for waking me up, assholes,” I said.

  “Can you see anything with those sunglasses on?” a voice asked—I couldn’t tell whose.

  “Of course,” I answered quickly. “I wear my sunglasses at night, like from the eighties.” I was trying to seem cool about it, not wanting to confess I couldn’t put in contacts. I didn’t want to be known as the girl who wore glasses. But the song was obscure, and I couldn’t sing it. It was awkward.

  Someone laughed. “It’s mad humid in here,” the voice said. It was from a thin face, very young.

  I felt the uneven giddiness of weed, bright heat, hanging white lanterns buzzin
g like fireflies in night’s still infinite black pool. The tingled joy of drug surging. Inked night heating.

  Edison and Chopper talked softly—I listened, dizzy—and I learned Chopper and his nineteen-year-old brother were hiking to honor their mother’s memory, to spread her ashes along the trail. Ten years before, their mother had died attempting to thru-hike the PCT. She’d frozen to death in the High Sierra.

  “So why’re you Chopper?” Edison asked. Insensitive, I wanted to apologize for him. He was still an asshole, I decided, but oh well. He was an asshole on my team.

  “We got airlifted out,” Chopper said, “me and Savior. We ran outta water a few miles ’fore Lake Morena and had to push our SPOT.” The SPOT is a GPS-synced emergency device that, when you push SOS, sends your GPS coordinates to the local wilderness rescue people, whoever that may be. Wherever you are.

  I didn’t carry one.

  His little brother said, “Got to ride in a chopper. Was mad fun.”

  Chopper took a long drag, coughed a deep cough. It didn’t sound good. “Got two more free evacs too,” he said.

  I asked what he meant.

  “We’ve got emergency evac insurance, so we can get lifted out two more times free.”

  I laughed.

  Icecap’s eyes got big.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was laughing, couldn’t stop. “I’m just,” I said, “I’m high.”

  It had, at some point I hadn’t noticed, started to rain again, but now I felt the tent lean, lean with the wind’s push. Someone passed me the joint again. Looking down at it, I saw the red of my lipstick just along the edge. I tried slowly thinking, pushing myself to pay attention to the men, but all I could think of was that last time—the night I’d lost control.

  I’d saved the too-short-to-smoke stub of the joint Junior had rolled us before he raped me. I had kept it safe in the right-front corner of my underwear drawer, just right next to the plastic button that had broken off my shorts that night. The underpants, which I no longer wore, were pushed against the back-left corner to create space for the evidence. I needed to create space separating these things from my things. I opened the drawer to check the evidence too often.