Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

  “Nobody’s ever broken up with me, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “I’ve always been the one to end relationships.” My face felt suddenly hot. I realized I was sitting with my arms wound around each other and my legs wrapped around each other too—in a yogic eagle pose, hopelessly twisted. I tried to relax and sit normally, but it was impossible. Reluctantly, I met his eyes. “Is this the part where I tell you about my father?” I asked, laughing falsely.

  It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. I hate him, I’d said during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy. There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by, bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we were all going to die right then and there.

  Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running through the icy snow. He shut Leif, Karen, and me out of our house a couple of times when we lived in Pennsylvania, when my mother was at work and he was left to care for us and he wanted a break. He ordered us into the back yard and locked the doors, my sister and me holding our barely walking baby brother by his gummy hands. We wandered through the grass weeping and then forgot about being upset and played house and rodeo queen. Later, enraged and bored, we approached the back door and pounded and hollered. I remember the door distinctly and also the three concrete stairs that led up to it, the way I had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window in the upper half.

  The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There is his love of Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers. There are the chocolate bars he brought home from his job in a grocery store. There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world. But even that is marred. He said this only when he was trying to woo my mother back, when he was claiming that things would be different now, when he was promising her that he would never again do what he’d done before.

  He always did it again. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.

  My mother packed us up and left him and came back, left him and came back. We never went far. There was nowhere for us to go. We didn’t have family nearby, and my mother was too proud to involve her friends. The first battered women’s shelter in the United States didn’t open until 1974, the year my mother finally left my father for good. Instead, we would drive all night long, my sister and me in the back seat, sleeping and waking to the alien green lights of the dashboard, Leif up front with our mom.

  The morning would find us home again, our father sober and scrambling eggs, singing that Charlie Rich song before long.

  When my mother finally called it quits with him, when I was six, a year after we’d all moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, I wept and begged her not to do it. Divorce seemed to me to be the very worst thing that could happen. In spite of everything, I loved my dad and I knew if my mom divorced him I’d lose him, and I was right. After they broke up the last time, we stayed in Minnesota and he returned to Pennsylvania and only intermittently got in touch. Once or twice a year a letter would arrive, addressed to Karen, Leif, and me, and we’d rip it open, filled with glee. But inside would be a diatribe about our mother, about what a whore she was, what a stupid, mooching welfare bitch. Someday he’d get us all, he promised. Someday we’d pay.

  “But we didn’t pay,” I’d said to Vince in our second and final session together. The next time I saw him, he’d explain that he was leaving his position; he’d give me the name and number of another therapist. “After my parents divorced, I realized that my father’s absence from my life was, sadly, a good thing. There weren’t any more violent scenes,” I said. “I mean, imagine my life if I’d been raised by my father.”

  “Imagine your life if you’d had a father who loved you as a father should,” Vince countered.

  I tried to imagine such a thing, but my mind could not be forced to do it. I couldn’t break it down into a list. I couldn’t land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like the whirl of white on the YOU ARE HERE poster behind Vince’s head. He was one giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I feared I’d never find myself inside that great white swirl.

  “What about your stepfather?” Vince asked. He glanced at the notebook on his lap, reading words he’d scrawled, presumably about me.

  “Eddie. He detached too,” I said lightly, as if it were nothing to me at all, as if it were almost amusing. “It’s a long story,” I said in the direction of the clock that hung near the YOU ARE THERE poster. “And time’s almost up.”

  “Saved by the bell,” Vince said, and we laughed.

  I could see the outline of Monster by the dim streetlights that filtered into my room in Sierra City, the feather Doug had given me sticking up from the place where I’d wedged it into my pack’s frame. I thought about corvidology. I wondered if the feather was really a symbol or if it was simply something I hauled along the way. I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. “You’re a seeker,” my mother had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in bed in the hospital, “like me.” But I didn’t know what my mother sought, exactly. Did she? It was the one question I hadn’t asked, but even if she’d told me, I’d have doubted her, pressing her to explain the spiritual realm, asking her how it could be proved. I even doubted things whose truth was verifiable. You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately—in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike—I had. But I didn’t keep the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

  I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around my naked body, and, stepping barefoot into the hall, walked past Greg’s door. In the bathroom, I shut the door behind me, turned on the tub’s faucet, and got in. The hot water was like magic, the thunder of it filling the room until I shut it off and there was a silence that seemed more silent than it had before. I lay back against the perfectly angled porcelain and stared at the wall until I heard a knock on the door.

  “Yes?” I said, but there was no reply, only the sound of footsteps retreating down the hallway. “Someone’s in here,” I called, though that was obvious. Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

  I
reached for a washcloth on the shelf near the tub and scrubbed myself with it, though I was already clean. I scrubbed my face and my neck and my throat and my chest and my belly and my back and my rump and my arms and my legs and my feet.

  “The first thing I did when each of you was born was kiss every part of you,” my mother used to say to my siblings and me. “I’d count every finger and toe and eyelash,” she’d say. “I’d trace the lines on your hands.”

  I didn’t remember it, and yet I’d never forgotten it. It was as much a part of me as my father saying he’d throw me out the window. More.

  I lay back and closed my eyes and let my head sink into the water until it covered my face. I got the feeling I used to get as a child when I’d done this very thing: as if the known world of the bathroom had disappeared and become, through the simple act of submersion, a foreign and mysterious place. Its ordinary sounds and sensations turned muted, distant, abstract, while other sounds and sensations not normally heard or registered emerged.

  I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.

  9

  STAYING FOUND

  I’d bypassed. Passed by. I was out of danger now. I’d leapfrogged over the snow. It was clear sailing through the rest of California, I supposed. Then through Oregon to Washington. My new destination was a bridge that crossed the Columbia River, which formed the border between the two states. The Bridge of the Gods. It was 1,008 trail miles away; I’d hiked only 170 so far, but my pace was picking up.

  In the morning, Greg and I walked out of Sierra City for a mile and a half along the shoulder of the road until we reached the place where it intersected the PCT, then walked together for a few minutes on the trail before pausing to say goodbye.

  “That’s called mountain misery,” I said, pointing at the low green bushes that edged the trail. “Or at least that’s what the guidebook says. Let’s hope it’s not literal.”

  “I think it might be,” Greg said, and he was right: the trail would rise nearly three thousand feet over the eight miles ahead. I was braced for the day, Monster loaded down with a week’s worth of food. “Good luck,” he said, his brown eyes meeting mine.

  “Good luck to you too.” I pulled him into a hard embrace.

  “Stay with it, Cheryl,” he said as he turned to go.

  “You too,” I called after him, as if he wouldn’t.

  Within ten minutes he was out of sight.

  I was excited to be back on the trail, 450 PCT miles north of where I’d been. The snowy peaks and high granite cliffs of the High Sierra were no longer in view, but the trail felt the same to me. In many ways, it looked the same too. For all the endless mountain and desert panoramas I’d seen, it was the sight of the two-foot-wide swath of the trail that was the most familiar, the thing upon which my eyes were almost always trained, looking for roots and branches, snakes and stones. Sometimes the trail was sandy, other times rocky or muddy or pebbly or cushioned with layers upon layers of pine needles. It could be black or brown or gray or blond as butterscotch, but it was always the PCT. Home base.

  I walked beneath a forest of pine, oak, and incense cedar, then passed through a stand of Douglas firs as the trail switchbacked up and up, seeing no one all that sunny morning as I ascended, though I could feel Greg’s invisible presence. With each mile that feeling waned, as I imagined him getting farther and farther ahead of me, hiking at his customary blazing pace. The trail passed from the shady forest to an exposed ridge, where I could see the canyon below me for miles, the rocky buttes overhead. By midday I was up above seven thousand feet and the trail grew muddy, though it hadn’t rained in days, and finally, when I rounded a bend, I came upon a field of snow. Or rather, what I took to be a field, which implied there was an end to it. I stood at its edge and searched for Greg’s footprints, but saw none. The snow wasn’t on a slope, just a flat among a sparse forest, which was a good thing, since I didn’t have my ice ax any longer. I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town. I didn’t have the money to mail it back to Lisa’s, much to my regret, given its expense, but I wasn’t willing to carry it either, believing I’d have no use for it from here on out.

  I jabbed my ski pole into the snow, skidded onto its icy surface, and began to walk, a feat I achieved only intermittently. In some places I skittered over the top of it; in others, my feet crashed through, sometimes forming potholes halfway up to my knees. Before long, the snow was packed into the ankles of my boots, my lower legs so snowburned it felt as if the flesh had been scraped away with a dull knife.

  That worried me less than the fact that I couldn’t see the trail because it was buried beneath the snow. The route seemed apparent enough, I assured myself, holding the pages from my guidebook as I walked, pausing to study each word as I went. After an hour, I stopped, suddenly scared. Was I on the PCT? All the while, I’d been searching for the small metal diamond-shaped PCT markers that were occasionally tacked to trees, but I hadn’t seen any. This wasn’t necessarily reason for alarm. I’d learned that the PCT markers were not to be relied upon. On some stretches they appeared every few miles; on others, I’d hike for days without spotting one.

  I pulled the topographical map of this area out of my shorts pocket. When I did, the nickel in my pocket came with it and fell into the snow. I reached for it, bending over unsteadily beneath my pack, but the moment my fingers grazed it, the nickel sank deeper and disappeared. I clawed through the snow looking for it, but it was gone.

  Now I only had sixty cents.

  I remembered the nickel in Vegas, the one with which I’d played the slots and won sixty dollars. I laughed out loud thinking about it, feeling as if these two nickels were connected, though I couldn’t explain why other than to say the daffy thought came to me as I stood there in the snow that day. Maybe losing the nickel was good luck the same way that the black feather that symbolized the void actually meant something positive. Maybe I wasn’t really in the very midst of the thing I’d just worked so hard to avoid. Maybe around the next bend I’d be in the clear.

  I was shivering by now, standing in the snow in my shorts and sweat-drenched T-shirt, but I didn’t dare continue on until I got my bearings. I unfolded the guidebook pages and read what the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California had to say about this portion of the trail. “From the trailside ridge, you confront a steady, bush-lined ascent,” it said to describe the place I thought I might have been. “Eventually your trail levels off at an open-forested flat …” I turned in a slow circle, getting a 360-degree view. Was this the open-forested flat? It would seem that the answer would be clear, but it was not. It was only clear that everything was buried in snow.

  I reached for my compass, which hung from a cord on the side of my pack near the world’s loudest whistle. I hadn’t used it since the day I was hiking on that road after my first hard week on the trail. I studied it in conjunction with the map and made my best guess about where I might be and walked on, inching forward uncertainly on the snow, alternately skidding across the top or breaking through the surface, my shins and calves growing ever more chafed each time. An hour later I saw a metal diamond that said PACIFIC CREST TRAIL tacked to a snowbound tree, and my body flooded with relief. I still didn’t know precisely where I was, but at least I knew I was on the PCT.

  By late afternoon I came to a ridgeline from which I could see down into a deep snow-filled bowl.

  “Greg!” I called, to test if he was near. I hadn’t seen a sign of him all day long, but I kept expecting him to appear, hoping the snow would slow him enough that I’d catch him and we could navigate through it together. I heard faint shouts and saw a trio of skiers on an adjoining ridge on the other side of the snowy bowl, close enough to hear, but impossible to reach. They waved their arms in big motions
to me and I waved back. They were far enough away and dressed in enough ski gear that I couldn’t make out whether they were male or female.

  “Where are we?” I yelled across the snowy expanse.

  “What?” I barely heard them yell back.

  I repeated the words over and over again—Where are we, Where are we—until my throat grew raw. I knew approximately where I believed myself to be, but I wanted to hear what they’d say, just to be sure. I asked and asked without getting through, so I tried one last time, putting everything I had into it, practically hurling myself off the side of the mountain with the effort, “WHERE ARE WE?”

  There was a pause, which told me they’d finally registered my question, and then in unison they yelled back, “CALIFORNIA!”

  By the way they fell against one another, I knew they were laughing.

  “Thanks,” I called out sarcastically, though my tone was lost in the wind.

  They called something back to me that I couldn’t quite make out. They repeated it again and again, but it got muddled each time until finally they shouted out the words one by one and I heard them.

  “ARE”

  “YOU”

  “LOST?”

  I thought about it for a moment. If I said yes, they’d rescue me and I’d be done with this godforsaken trail.

  “NO,” I roared. I wasn’t lost.

  I was screwed.

  I looked around at the trees, the waning light slanting through them. It would be evening soon and I’d have to find a place to camp. I would pitch my tent in the snow and wake in the snow and continue on in the snow. This, in spite of everything I’d done to avoid it.