I left the restaurant with nothing more than some change in my pocket. I walked past a pay phone and then returned to it, picked up the receiver, and pressed o, my insides trembling with a mix of fear and excitement. When the operator came on to assist me in placing the call, I gave her Paul’s number.
He picked up on the third ring. I was so overcome by the sound of his voice I could barely say hello. “Cheryl!” he exclaimed.
“Paul!” I said finally, and then in a fast jumble I told him where I was and some of what I’d been through since I’d last seen him. We talked for close to an hour, our conversation loving and exuberant, supportive and kind. It didn’t seem like he was my ex-husband. It seemed like he was my best friend. When I hung up, I looked down at my food bag on the ground. It was almost empty, robin’s-egg blue and tubular, made of a treated material that felt like rubber. I lifted it up, pressed it against my body, and closed my eyes.
I walked back to my camp and sat for a long time on my picnic table with A Summer Bird-Cage in my hands, too staggered with emotion to read. I watched the people make their dinners all around me and then I watched the yellow sun melt into pink and orange and the softest lavender in the sky. I missed Paul. I missed my life. But I didn’t want to go back to it either. That awful moment when Paul and I fell onto the floor after I told him the truth about my infidelities kept coming to me in waves, and I realized that what I’d started when I’d spoken those words hadn’t led only to my divorce but to this: to me sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the magnificent sky. I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.
I went to Monster and took out the cigarette in the faux-glass case that Jimmy Carter had given me earlier that day. I didn’t smoke, but I broke the case open anyway, sat on top of the picnic table, and lit the cigarette. I’d been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.
I took a drag and blew the smoke from my mouth, remembering how I’d felt more alone than anyone in the whole wide world that morning after Jimmy Carter drove away. Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world.
Maybe that was okay.
12
THIS FAR
I woke at first light, moving with precision as I broke camp. I could pack up in five minutes now. Every item that had been in that unfathomable heap on the bed in the motel in Mojave that hadn’t already been ditched or burned had its place in or on my pack and I knew exactly where that place was. My hands moved to it on instinct, seeming almost to bypass my brain. Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.
Bearing Monster’s weight had changed me on the outside too. My legs had become as hard as boulders, their muscles seemingly capable of anything, rippling beneath my thinning flesh in ways they never had. The patches on my hips and shoulders and tailbone that had repeatedly bled and scabbed over in the places where Monster’s straps rubbed my body had finally surrendered, becoming rough and pocked, my flesh morphing into what I can only describe as a cross between tree bark and a dead chicken after it’s been dipped in boiling water and plucked.
My feet? Well, they were still entirely, unspeakably fucked.
My two big toes had never recovered from the beating they took on the merciless descent from Three Lakes to Belden Town. Their nails looked near dead. My pinky toes had been rubbed so raw I wondered if they’d eventually just wear clean away from my feet. What seemed like permanent blisters covered the backs of my heels all the way up to my ankles. But I refused to think of my feet that morning in Old Station. So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.
It was early but hot already as I walked the road to the place where the PCT crossed it. I felt rested and strong, braced for the day. I spent the morning weaving my way through dry creek beds and bone-hard gullies, pausing to sip water as seldom as I could. By midmorning I was walking across a miles-wide escarpment, a high dry field of weeds and wildflowers that offered barely a scrap of shade. The few trees I passed were dead, killed in the fire years before, their trunks scorched white or charred black, their branches broken and burnt into daggers. Their stark beauty bore down on me with a silent anguished force as I passed them by.
The blue sky was everywhere above me, the sun bright and unrelenting, scorching me even through my hat and the sunscreen I rubbed into my sweaty face and arms. I could see for miles—snowy Lassen Peak nearby to the south and the higher and snowier Mount Shasta rising far to the north. The sight of Mount Shasta filled me with relief. I was going there. I would walk past it and beyond it, all the way to the Columbia River. Now that I’d escaped the snow, it seemed nothing could take me off course. An image of myself hiking with ease and alacrity through the rest of the miles formed in my mind, though the shimmering heat soon eradicated it, reminding me that I knew better. If I made it to the Oregon-Washington border, I knew it would only be with all the hardships that moving at foot speed beneath a monster of a pack entailed.
Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one. And humbler still that day on Hat Creek Rim as the temperature moved from hot to hotter, the wind doing little more than whip the dust into swirls at my feet. It was during one such gust that I heard a sound more insistent than any caused by the wind and realized that it was a rattlesnake shaking its rattle hard and near, warning me off. I scrambled backwards and saw the snake a few steps ahead of me on the trail, its rattle held like a scolding finger slightly above its coiled body, its blunt face darting in my direction. If I’d taken another few steps, I’d have been upon it. It was the third rattlesnake I’d encountered on the trail. I made an almost comically wide arc around it, and continued on.
At midday I found a narrow patch of shade and sat down to eat. I took my socks and boots off and reclined in the dirt to prop up my swollen and battered feet on my pack, as I almost always did on my lunch break. I stared at the sky, watching the hawks and eagles that soared in serene circles above me, but I couldn’t quite relax. It wasn’t only because of the rattlesnake. The landscape was barren enough that I could see for great distances, though I kept having the vague feeling that something lurked nearby, watching me, waiting to pounce. I sat up and scanned the terrain for mountain lions, then lay back down, telling myself that there was nothing to fear, before I quickly sat up again at what I thought was the snap of a branch.
It was nothing, I told myself. I was not afraid. I reached for my water bottle and took a long drink. I was so thirsty that I chugged it until it was empty, then I opened the other one and drank from that too, unable to stop myself. The thermometer that dangled from the zipper on my pack said it was 100 degrees in my shaded patch.
I sang cool songs as I walked, the sun beating me as if it had an actual physical force that consisted of more than heat. Sweat collected around my sunglasses and streamed into my eyes, sti
nging them so I had to stop and wipe my face every now and then. It seemed impossible that I’d been up in the snowy mountains wearing all of my clothes only the week before, that I’d awakened to a thick layer of frost on my tent walls each morning. I couldn’t rightly remember it. Those white days seemed like a dream, as if all this time I’d been staggering north in the scorching heat into this, my fifth week on the trail, straight through the same heat that had almost driven me off the trail in my second week. I stopped and drank again. The water was so hot it almost hurt my mouth.
Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I walked, scratchy plants I couldn’t identify grazed my calves. Others I knew seemed to speak to me, saying their names to me in my mother’s voice. Names I didn’t realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne’s lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine—those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white and orange and purple. When we passed them as we drove, my mother would sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch.
I stopped walking and looked up at the sky. The birds of prey still circled, hardly seeming to flap their wings. I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body through the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I’d achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten.
I stopped and bent over, pressing my hands to my knees to ease my back for a moment. The sweat dripped from my face onto the pale dirt like tears.
The Modoc Plateau was different from the Mojave Desert, but it didn’t feel different. Both teemed with jagged desert plants while being entirely inhospitable to human life. Tiny gray and brown lizards either zipped across the trail as I approached or held their position as I passed. Where did they get water? I wondered, trying to stop myself from thinking about how hot and thirsty I was. Where would I? I was three miles away from the water tank, I reckoned. I had eight ounces of water left.
Then six.
Then four.
I forced myself not to drink the last two until I had the water tank in sight and by 4:30 there it was: the stilted legs of the burned fire lookout on a rise in the distance. Nearby was a metal tank propped up against a post. As soon as I saw it, I pulled out my bottle and drank the last of my water, thankful that in a matter of minutes I’d be able to drink my fill from the tank. As I approached, I saw that the wooden post near the tank was covered with something that flapped in the wind. It looked like several shredded ribbons at first and then a ripped cloth. It wasn’t until I got up close that I saw they were tiny scraps of paper—notes stuck to the post with duct tape and now fluttering in the wind. I lurched forward to read them, knowing what they would say even before my eyes met the paper. They said what they said in various ways, but they all bore the same message: NO WATER.
I stood motionless for a moment, paralyzed with dread. I gazed into the tank to confirm what was true. There was no water. I had no water. Not even a sip.
Nowaternowaternowaternowaternowaternowater.
I kicked the dirt and grabbed fistfuls of sage and threw them, furious with myself for yet again doing the wrong thing, for being the same idiot I’d been the very day I set foot on the trail. The same one who had purchased the wrong size boots and profoundly underestimated the amount of money I’d need for the summer, and even maybe the same idiot who believed I could hike this trail.
I pulled the ripped-out guidebook pages from my shorts pocket and read them again. I wasn’t scared in the same way I’d been earlier in the day, when I had the funny feeling that something was lurking nearby. Now I was terrified. This wasn’t a feeling. It was a fact: I was miles from water on a hundred-and-something-degree day. I knew that this was the most serious situation I’d been in so far on the trail—more threatening than the marauding bull, more harrowing than the snow. I needed water. I needed it soon. I needed it now. I could feel that need in my every pore. I remembered Albert asking me how many times I urinated each day when I’d first met him. I hadn’t peed since I’d left Old Station that morning. I hadn’t needed to. Every ounce I’d ingested had been used. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even spit.
The authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California said the nearest “reliable” water was fifteen miles away at Rock Spring Creek, but they conceded there was, in fact, water nearer by in a reservoir that they strongly advised against drinking from, calling its quality “questionable at best.” That water was nearly five miles farther up the trail.
Unless, of course, the reservoir had also gone dry.
There was a distinct chance that it had, I acknowledged, as I did my version of racing toward it, which, given the condition of my feet and the weight of my pack, was nothing more than a decidedly brisk walk. It felt as if I could see the entire world from the east rim of Hat Creek. A wide valley spread below me into the distance, interrupted by green volcanic mountains to both the north and the south. Even in my anxious state, I couldn’t help but feel rapturous at the beauty. I was a big fat idiot, yes, one who might die of dehydration and heat exhaustion, yes, but at least I was in a beautiful place—a place I’d come to love, in spite and because of its hardships—and I’d gotten myself into this place on my own two feet. Consoling myself with this, I walked on, so thirsty that I became nauseated and slightly feverish. I’ll be okay, I told myself. It’s just another bit farther, I said around each bend and over every rise as the sun sank toward the horizon until at last I saw the reservoir.
I stopped to gaze at it. It was a miserable-looking mucky pond about the size of a tennis court, but there was water in it. I was laughing with joy as I staggered down the slope toward the little dirt beach that surrounded the reservoir. I’d hiked my first twenty-mile day. I unbuckled Monster and set it onto the ground and went to the muddy shore and squatted to put my hands in the water. It was gray and warm as blood. When I moved my hands, the muck from the bottom rose in weedy tendrils and streaked the water black.
I got my purifier and pumped the questionable liquid into my bottle. My purifier had remained as difficult to use as it had been that first time I used it at Golden Oak Springs, but it was especially difficult in this water, so dense with sludge that it half jammed my filter. By the time I was done filling one bottle, my arms shook with fatigue. I went to my first aid kit and took out my iodine pills and dropped a couple into the water. I’d brought the pills for just this reason, reinforcement should I ever be compelled to drink water that was likely contaminated. Even Albert had thought the iodine pills a good idea back in Kennedy Meadows, when he’d been ruthlessly tossing things into the get-rid-of pile. Albert, who’d been felled by a waterborne illness the very next day.
I had to wait thirty minutes for the iodine to do its work before it was safe to drink. I was desperately thirsty, but I distracted myself by filling my other bottle with water. When I was done, I laid out my tarp on the dirt beach, stood on top of it, and took off my clothes. The wind had mellowed with the fading light. In gentle wafts, it cooled the hot patches on my naked hips. It didn’t occur to me that anyone might come along the trail. I hadn’t seen a soul all day, and even if someone did come along, I was too catatonic with dehydration and exhaustion to care.
I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes had passed since I’d plopped the iodine pills into my water. Usually I was starving by evening, but the idea of eating was nothing to me now. Water was my only desire.
I sat on my blue tarp and drank one bottle down and then the other. The warm water tasted like iron and mud and yet seldom have I ever consumed anythin
g so amazing. I could feel it moving into me, though even once I’d had two 32-ounce bottles, I wasn’t entirely restored. I still wasn’t hungry. I felt like I had in those first days on the trail, when I’d been so astoundingly exhausted that all my body wanted was sleep. Now all my body wanted was water. I filled my bottles again, let the iodine purify them, and drank them both.
By the time I was sated, it was dark and the full moon was rising. I couldn’t muster the energy to set up my tent—a task that required little more than two minutes’ effort, which now seemed Herculean to me. I didn’t need a tent. It hadn’t rained since my first couple of days on the trail. I put my clothes back on and spread out my sleeping bag on the tarp, but it was too hot still to do anything but lie on top of it. I was too tired to read. Even gazing at the moon felt like a mild effort. I’d consumed 128 ounces of questionable reservoir water since I’d arrived a couple of hours before and I still didn’t have to pee. I had done a stupendously dumb thing by setting out across Hat Creek Rim with so little water. I’ll never be so careless again, I promised the moon before falling asleep.
I woke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. “Hmm,” I moaned, turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.