There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.
There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.
And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but hundreds of small cool black frogs.
Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.
Each one was the approximate size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.
Within an instant, I was among them, hopping, scrambling, leaping, and hurling myself, my pack, my tarp, and everything that sat on it into the brush beyond the beach, swatting frogs from my hair and the folds of my T-shirt as I went. I couldn’t help but squash a few beneath my bare feet. Finally safe, I stood watching them from the frog-free perimeter, the frantic motion of their little dark bodies apparent in the blazing moonlight. I checked my shorts pockets for errant frogs. I gathered my things into a little clear patch that seemed flat enough for my tent and pulled it from my pack. I didn’t need to see what I was doing. My tent was up with the flick of my wrist.
I crawled out of it at 8:30 the next morning. Eight thirty was late for me, like noon in my former life. And this 8:30 felt like noon in my former life too. Like I’d been out drinking into the wee hours. I half stood, looking around groggily. I still didn’t have to pee. I packed up and pumped more filthy water and walked north beneath the scorching sun. It was even hotter than it had been the day before. Within an hour, I almost stepped on another rattlesnake, though it too warned me off politely with its rattle.
By late afternoon any thought of making it all the way to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park by day’s end had been shot down entirely by my late start, my throbbing and blistered feet, and the staggering heat. Instead, I took a short detour off the trail to Cassel, where my guidebook promised there would be a general store. It was nearly three by the time I reached it. I took off my pack and sat on a wooden chair on the store’s old-fashioned porch, nearly catatonic from the heat. The big thermometer in the shade read 102 degrees. I counted my money, feeling on the verge of tears, knowing that no matter how much I had, it wouldn’t be enough for a Snapple lemonade. My desire for one had grown so large that it wasn’t even a longing anymore. It was more like a limb growing from my gut. It would cost 99 cents or $1.05 or $1.15—I didn’t know how much exactly. I knew I had only 76 cents and that wouldn’t be enough. I went into the store anyway, just to look.
“You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling at her.
“Where you from?”
“Minnesota,” I called as I made my way along a bank of glass-fronted doors with cold drinks lined up in neat rows inside. I passed cans of icy beer and soda pop, bottles of mineral water and juice. I stopped at the door where the racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of lemonade—there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or pornography. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.
“If you’re done hiking for the day, you’re welcome to camp out in the field behind the store,” the woman said to me. “We let all the PCT hikers stay there.”
“Thanks, I think I’ll do that,” I said, still staring at the drinks. Perhaps I could just hold one, I thought. Just press it against my forehead for a moment. I opened the door and pulled out a bottle of pink lemonade. It was so cold it felt like it was burning my hand. “How much is this?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking.
“I saw you counting your pennies outside,” the woman laughed. “How much you got?”
I gave her everything I had while thanking her profusely and took the Snapple out onto the porch. Each sip sent a stab of heady pleasure through me. I held the bottle with both hands, wanting to absorb every bit of cool I could. Cars pulled up and people got out and went into the store, then came out and drove away. I watched them for an hour in a post-Snapple bliss that felt more like a drugged-up haze. After a while, a pickup slowed in front of the store just long enough for a man to climb out of the back and pull out his backpack behind him before waving the driver away. He turned to me and spotted my pack.
“Hey!” he said, a giant smile spreading across his pink beefy face. “It’s one hell of a hot day to hike on the PCT, don’t you think?”
His name was Rex. He was a big red-haired guy, gregarious and gay and thirty-eight years old. He struck me as the kind of person who gave a lot of bear hugs. He went into the store and bought three cans of beer and drank them as he sat beside me on the porch, where together we talked into the evening. He lived in Phoenix and held a corporate job he couldn’t properly make me understand, but he’d grown up in a little town in southern Oregon. He’d hiked from the Mexican border to Mojave in the spring—getting off the trail at the very place where I’d gotten on and at about the same time as well—to return to Phoenix for six weeks to tend to some business matters before starting back on the trail at Old Station, having elegantly bypassed all the snow.
“I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments.
“But I can’t get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer too ashamed to admit it.
“Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex.
“REI.”
“Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for free.”
“They will?”
“Call the 1-800 number,” he said.
I thought about it all through the evening as Rex and I camped together in the field behind the store, and all the next day as I raced faster than ever through twelve mercifully unchallenging miles to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park. When I arrived, I immediately collected my resupply box from the concessionaire’s store and went to the pay phone nearby to call the operator and then REI. Within five minutes, the woman I spoke to had agreed to mail me a new pair of boots, one size larger, via overnight mail, no charge.
“Are you sure?” I kept asking her, yammering on about the trouble my too-small boots had caused me.
“Yes,” she said placidly, and now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. I gave her the address of the park store, reading it from my as-yet-unopened box. I’d have jumped with joy after I hung up the phone if my feet had been well enough to do it. I ripped open my box and found my twenty dollars and joined the crowd of tourists in the line, hoping none of them would notice that I reeked. I bought an ice-cream cone and sat at a picnic table eating it with barely restrained glee. Rex walked up as I sat there, and a few minutes after that Trina appeared with her big white dog. We embraced and I introduced her to Rex. She and Stacy had arrived the day before. She’d decided to get off the trail here and return to Colorado to do several day hikes near her home for the rest of the summer instead of hiking the PCT. Stacy would be continuing on as planned.
“I’m sure she’d be happy if you joined her,” Trina added. “She’ll be hiking out in the morning.”
“I can’t,” I said, and giddily explained that I needed to wait for my new boots.
“We worried about you on Hat Creek Rim,” she said. “No water at—”
“I know,” I said, and we ruefully shook our heads.
“Come,” she said to Rex and me. “I’ll show you where we’re camped. It’s a twenty-minute walk, but it’s away from all this,” she gestured with an air of disdain toward the tourists, the snack bar, and the store. “Plus, it’s free.”
My feet had gotten to the point that each time I rested it hurt more the next time I got up to walk,
their various sores reopening with every new effort. I limped behind Trina and Rex down a path through the woods that took us back to the PCT, where there was a small clearing among the trees.
“Cheryl!” Stacy called, coming to hug me.
We talked about Hat Creek Rim and the heat, the trail and the lack of water, and what the snack bar had to offer for dinner. I took off my boots and socks and put on my camp sandals and set up my tent and went through the pleasant ritual of unpacking my box while we chatted. Stacy and Rex made fast friends and decided to hike the next section of the trail together. By the time I was ready to walk back up to the snack bar for dinner, my big toes had swollen and reddened so much that they looked like two beets. I couldn’t even bear to wear socks anymore, so I hobbled up to the snack bar in my sandals instead, where we sat around a picnic table with paper boats of hot dogs and jalapeño poppers and nachos with fluorescent orange cheese dripping off the sides. It felt like a feast and a celebration. We held up our wax cups of soda pop and made a toast.
“To Trina and Odin’s trip home!” we said, and clinked our cups.
“To Stacy and Rex hitting the trail!” we cheered.
“To Cheryl’s new boots!” we yelled.
And I drank with solemnity to that.
When I woke the next morning, my tent was the only one in the clearing among the trees. I walked up to the bathhouse meant for the campers in the official park campground, took a shower, and returned to my campsite, where I sat in my camp chair for hours. I ate breakfast and read half of A Summer Bird-Cage in one sitting. In the afternoon, I walked to the store near the snack bar to see if my boots were there, but the woman who worked at the counter told me the mail hadn’t arrived yet.
I left forlornly, strolling in my sandals down a short paved path to an overlook to see the grand falls that the park is named for. Burney Falls is the most voluminous waterfall in the state of California for most of the year, a sign explained. As I gazed at the thundering water, I felt almost invisible among the people with their cameras, fanny packs, and Bermuda shorts. I sat on a bench and watched a couple feed an entire pack of Breathsavers to a gaggle of overly familiar squirrels who darted around a sign that said DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE. It enraged me to see them do that, but my fury was not only about how they were perpetuating the habituation of the squirrels, I realized. It was also that they were a couple. To witness the way they leaned into each other and laced their fingers together and tugged each other tenderly down the paved path was almost unbearable. I was simultaneously sickened by it and envious of what they had. Their existence seemed proof that I would never succeed at romantic love. I’d felt so strong and content while talking on the phone with Paul in Old Station only a few days before, but I didn’t feel anything like that anymore. Everything that had rested then was roiling now.
I limped back to my camp and examined my tortured big toes. To so much as graze against them had become excruciating. I could literally see them throbbing—the blood beneath my flesh pulsating in a regular rhythm that flushed my nails white then pink, white then pink. They were so swollen that it looked as if my nails were simply going to pop off. It occurred to me that popping them off might actually be a good idea. I pinched one of the nails, and with a solid tug, followed by a second of searing pain, the nail gave way and I felt instant, almost total, relief. A moment later, I did the same with the other toe.
It was me against the PCT when it came to my toenails, I realized.
The score was 6–4, and I was just barely hanging on to my lead.
By nightfall four other PCT hikers joined my encampment. They arrived as I was burning the last pages of A Summer Bird-Cage in my little aluminum pie pan, two couples about my age who’d hiked all the way from Mexico, minus the same section of the socked-in Sierra Nevada I’d skipped. Each couple had set out separately, but they’d met and joined forces in southern California, hiking and bypassing the snow together in a weeks-long wilderness double date. John and Sarah were from Alberta, Canada, and hadn’t even been dating a year when they’d started to hike the PCT. Sam and Helen were a married couple from Maine. They were laying over the next day, but I was heading on, I told them, as soon as my new boots arrived.
The next morning I packed up Monster and walked to the store wearing my sandals, my boots tied to the frame of my pack. I sat at one of the nearby picnic tables waiting for the mail to arrive. I was eager to hike away not so much because I felt like hiking, but because I had to. In order to reach each resupply point on roughly the day I’d anticipated, I had a schedule to keep. In spite of all the changes and bypasses, for reasons related to both money and weather, I needed to stick to my plan to finish my trip by mid-September. I sat for hours reading the book that had come in my box—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—while waiting for my boots to arrive. People came and went in waves, sometimes gathering in little circles around me to ask questions about the PCT when they noticed my pack. As I spoke, the doubts I had about myself on the trail fell away for whole minutes at a time and I forgot all about being a big fat idiot. Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn’t just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.
“I advise you to put this on your résumé,” said an old woman from Florida adorned in a bright pink visor and a fistful of gold necklaces. “I used to work in HR. Employers look for things like this. It tells them that you’ve got character. It sets you apart from the rest.”
The mailman pulled up around three. The UPS guy came an hour later. Neither one of them had my boots. My stomach sinking, I went to the pay phone and called REI.
They hadn’t yet mailed my boots, the man I spoke to politely informed me. The problem was, they’d learned they could not get them to the state park overnight, so they wanted to send them by regular mail instead, but because they hadn’t known how to contact me to tell me this, they’d done nothing at all. “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “I’m hiking the PCT. I’m sleeping in the woods. Of course you couldn’t have gotten in touch with me. And I can’t wait here for—how long will it take for my boots to come in the regular mail?”
“Approximately five days,” he replied, unperturbed.
“Five days?” I asked. I couldn’t exactly be upset. They were mailing me a new pair of boots for free, after all, but still I was frustrated and panicked. In addition to maintaining my schedule, I needed the food I had in my bag for the next section of the trail—the eighty-three-mile stretch that took me to Castle Crags. If I stayed in Burney Falls to wait for my boots, I’d have to eat that food because—with little more than five dollars left—I didn’t have enough money to spend the next five days eating from the park’s snack bar. I reached for my pack, got my guidebook, and found the address for Castle Crags. I couldn’t imagine hiking another blistering eighty-three miles in my too-small boots, but I had no choice but to ask REI to send them there.
When I hung up the phone, I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen anymore.
I stared at my boots with a pleading expression, as if we could possibly work out a deal. They were dangling from my pack by their dusty red laces, evil in their indifference. I’d planned to leave them in the PCT hiker free box as soon as my new boots arrived. I reached for them, but I couldn’t bring myself to put them on. Perhaps I could wear my flimsy camp sandals for short stretches on the trail. I’d met a few people who switched off between boots and sandals while they hiked, but their sandals were far sturdier than mine. I’d never intended to wear my sandals to hike. I’d brought them only to give my feet a break from my boots at the end of the day, cheap knockoffs I’d purchased at a discount store for something like $19.99. I took them off and cradled them in my hands, as if by examining them up close I could bestow on them a durability they did not possess. The Velcro was matted with detritus and peeling away from the black straps at the frayed ends. Their blue soles were malleable as dough and so thin that when I walked I could
feel the contours of pebbles and sticks beneath my feet. Wearing them was just barely more than having no shoes on at all. And I was going to walk to Castle Crags in these?
Maybe I shouldn’t, I thought. Maybe I wouldn’t. This far was far enough. I could put it on my résumé.
“Fuck,” I said. I picked up a rock and whipped it hard as I could at a nearby tree, and then another and another.
I thought of the woman I always thought of in such moments: an astrologer who’d read my natal chart when I was twenty-three. A friend had arranged for the reading as a going-away gift just before I left Minnesota for New York City. The astrologer was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman named Pat who sat me down at her kitchen table with a piece of paper covered in mysterious markings and a quietly whirring tape recorder between us. I didn’t put much faith in it. I thought it would be a bit of fun, an ego-boosting session during which she’d say generic things like You have a kind heart.
But she didn’t. Or rather, she said those things, but she also said bizarrely specific things that were so accurate and particular, so simultaneously consoling and upsetting, that it was all I could do not to bawl in recognition and grief. “How can you know this?” I kept demanding. And then I would listen as she explained about the planets, the sun and the moon, the “aspects” and the moment I was born; about what it meant to be a Virgo, with a moon in Leo and Gemini rising. I’d nod while thinking, This is a bunch of crazy New Age anti-intellectual bullshit, and then she’d say another thing that would blow my brain into about seven thousand pieces because it was so true.
Until she began to speak of my father. “Was he a Vietnam vet?” she asked. No, I told her, he wasn’t. He was in the military briefly in the mid-1960s—in fact, he was stationed at the base in Colorado Springs where my mother’s father was stationed, which is how my parents met—but he never went to Vietnam.