Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  I bit into a green apple, then saw I’d nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, just skimmed its edge; the snake lay across the trail like the shadow of a branch, at least three feet long. Its brown and beige mosaic stark and distinct against dust. I shrieked.

  The snake rushed over the bone-colored dirt with impossible speed and into a hard-leafed creosote bush, its rattling fast and hollow, more menacing than any human sound. I ran back south a hundred yards; I was fine. I stood and breathed a minute, then walked back north, kept walking, watched my feet quickly move.

  Again I bit my apple, breathed, chewed—my last piece of fresh food; everything else was processed or salted or junk. I already regretted eating the fruit so soon.

  The path ahead would be dangerous, I couldn’t deny that. I stepped along the trail, over another snake, unsure what kind it was. It was skinny and dusty; I stepped; I heard no rattle. I stepped over another, gasped; I nearly hadn’t seen it. Another. The snakes were endless, the venom of their bite deadly. The Mojave Green Rattlesnake, a pit viper native to the deserts of the South Western United States, is infamous for its potent, debilitating neurotoxic venom. Chance of survival is good if medical attention is sought within minutes of a bite—fair if within an hour. But after that serious symptoms rapidly develop: Vision abnormalities and difficulty swallowing and speaking. Skeletal muscle weakness leads to difficulty breathing: respiratory failure. In cities, fatality is uncommon—antivenom is effective—but the untreated bite of a Mojave Green is fatal. Which meant, for me, a bite would be fatal.

  So many things can happen to hikers in this mountainous desert, frightening things. I recalled something dark I’d read about the hot springs out here—warm swimming holes of gleaming black water—the pools’ bottoms silty, so soft they were almost slimy. That softness is a slick algae. It coats rocks and as tired hikers slip their toes over the stones, puffing up sediment, opaque clouds rise in the clear black water. These hot springs host Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that invades the human central nervous system through the nose, climbs along nerve fibers, up through the floor of the cranium, into the brain. With a “unique sucking apparatus,” it eats cells of the brain. Such invasions are rare but most always end in death. Ninety-eight percent of infected humans die within half a month. The 2 percent who live through the invisible attack will be brain-damaged and nerve-damaged. Their taste buds will mutate and food will smell repulsive. They’ll vomit, nauseated at the odor of baked bread, or of bacon frying—every odor. They’ll grow confused, hallucinate and suffer through seizures. Their bodies will live on, out of their control. Then, the prognosis is bleak. There is no cure. N. fowleri will be discovered postmortem. There is no vaccine.

  Rape had also stolen my control over my body, but at least it was survivable. And there were other things too; things I couldn’t so clearly avoid:

  Lyme disease, waterborne illness, dehydration. These dangers were common. Giardia, a microscopic parasite that swims in water tainted by cow patties or rodent scat—or any animal feces—is a constant sickness risk. Hikers have to drink water from streams, mountain lakes and springs, there’s really no other option, but water sources contaminated with Giardia can cause hikers intestinal illness—abdominal cramps, nausea, and debilitating, dizzying dehydration that leaves hikers demobilized. Treatment for Giardia requires an antibiotic available in town—and somehow you need to get to town.

  Along the Pacific Crest Trail, I would only encounter small mountain-towns where I’d get to shower and wash up about once a week. I’d stride and sweat; I’d stink. My backpack would absorb my back sweat, reek worse than a gym bag. My brown synthetic T-shirt would fade tan, salt crusted, its armpits black. I would carry bacteria. A complete community of independent maladies, hitchhiking on me. We all could make it, if we all behaved. I prayed on specks of twirling dust, on the first shooting star I would see that desert night: no ataxia. No bacteria that eats brain and body cells. I prayed: behave. Behave.

  Yet looking up that dusty path into desolation, basking snakes and bacteria didn’t concern me, they weren’t threats I considered. In retrospect, it’s stunning to think how the most damaging threats were also the most common and how easy it was to die. Only about five hundred people arrive each spring at this trail from Mexico to attempt to hike the whole way to Canada, and fewer than half of those—some odd two hundred—will make it all the way. In all of history, fewer people on the planet have walked along the Pacific Crest Trail the whole way from Mexico to Canada than have summited Mount Everest. And each year—every single year—some hikers die.

  For three hours I walked briskly without stopping. The walking itself was shockingly easy, the trail gradually descending, ascending, a smooth dusty path through fields of brittle grasses, hard chaparral shrubs, and graying cacti. Lonely blue mountains so pale they were almost ghosts against the sky spread at the western horizon. I now stepped over basking snakes as if they were only sticks. It amazed me how quickly I’d gotten used to them and I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless.

  In a blink the trail became green. The dry grasses and waxy plants vanished. A canopy of trees quivered above my head, and I heard the sound of running water and noticed a person: a man. My first instinct was to turn off the trail, slyly step without sound around him so he wouldn’t notice me. But then I thought: how crazy. How absolutely unnecessary. I would have to trust that this man wouldn’t hurt me.

  This was the other danger I couldn’t ignore and had in fact always known: Most people who attempt to thru-hike the PCT are men. I had signed myself up for this. If men were the truest trail danger, I would soon be dead as sundried wood.

  The man was leaning against a big white rock and drinking water out of a Nalgene water bottle—not a Gatorade bottle, the much lighter option. I was disheartened to notice that his backpack was massive. Mine was little as a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Now, looking at the huge size difference, I doubted the sufficiency of my tiny pack, I doubted everything.

  The man nodded at me.

  I stopped walking. He looked to be in his midtwenties, very tall and pasty, his backpack like a second body beside him.

  “You thru-hiking?” I asked. I wanted explanation of all the stuff he was lugging. Really, I wanted confirmation from a fellow hiker that I was carrying the right things, too—that I could make it. In that motel room with my father, I’d been more focused on putting together my playlist than on the things that were going into my pack to keep me alive, and now, standing in the desert at the trail’s beginning before a man with a huge backpack, my intent focus on my dad’s music seemed misguided. Maybe I should have packed more things.

  The man squinted at me, said, “Hey. Left Field.”

  It took a moment to realize that he was telling me his name. “You’re Left Field?” I asked him, squinting also. Even in shade, the air was impossibly bright. “What’s that from?”

  “From the A.T. ’cause I’m just really random. And sometimes I’m off in left field, so . . .”

  So he had already hiked the Appalachian Trail. So he probably knew what he was doing.

  “When you finishing?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “When you plan to finish the trail?”

  I found this question surprising. I didn’t really know. “Oh. Late August? Somewhere ’round there. School starts in late August, so I have to be done by then.”

  To really finish by the end of August, I would have to average twenty-something miles a day with not one day of rest. If I’d actually believed I’d be finishing in last August, I was lying to myself. I would be crazy. The truth was I didn’t know. I wasn’t then thinking about life after the trail; life after the trail seemed more a wish than a plan.

  “Then I won’t see you,” he said. “I’m not gonna finish till October, probably.”

  I scooped water from the small creek with an empty bottle and we said bye, bye to each other, and I kept walking and he stayed there. He hadn’t mentioned my tiny knapsack, and I’d never as
ked him about all of the things he was carrying, and if I needed them too.

  Again I ran. Up, up to the top of a hump then down its back side, fast; again the place was desert. No more shade. As fast as I had entered: out of that tiny and sudden oasis hugging that loud stream. Singing to myself along the dusty trail, thinking: I’m okay. Left Field’s okay.

  I really never did see Left Field again.

  The sun was low when I finally took my first break, stopped walking and sat in the center of the trail—no sharp things there. Soft dust. No birds above. The sky endless, a blank mask, and I felt energized, not tired, impossibly all right. I chugged the last of my water. Not hungry, but wanting lime or green apple, any tart juice. My tongue felt weirdly rough. My taste buds were raised like goose bumps. Even hydrated with that extra water from the creeklet, I needed to make it to Hauser Creek at mile 16 to drink water tonight.

  That first dusk was sudden, like the sharp darkness after a lightning strike. The sky had been clear all day, but walking over sand I smelled rain, felt electricity in my hair and fingers. I was very thirsty, smelling water, wishing for it. The earth softened suddenly, the dirt no longer compacted, small reddish dead leaves scattered on the ground like brittle hands. Tufts of real green grass appeared, the type you’d see on an unkempt baseball field’s outfield. Then I noticed dark, damp stones laid out in a row. Euphoria hit. It was Hauser Creek. I had gotten on the trail at 1:30 P.M. with sixteen miles to hike and by that first dark walked those sixteen miles. I’d made myself make it all the way to water. I’d made it. I’d accomplished my ambitious afternoon’s goal. Now, I would have only four miles to Lake Morena—to Kickoff—in the morning, and I was very proud.

  I set up my tent alongside Hauser Creek, among the tents and tarps of hikers I didn’t know. Some lit from inside by headlamps, glowing golden. It was a small encampment of hopeful new thru-hikers, but it surprised me how I didn’t feel the need to meet them. Each of them wanted to do the same thing I wanted to do, but now—able to meet them in the flesh—I no longer wondered why. In a black clump on a slab of rock, a group of hikers talked softly, laughed together in bursts. I didn’t join them.

  I climbed into my tent alone. Lying against the smooth cool nylon of my tent floor, I realized I’d imagined I would mostly be alone. Desert wilderness had seemed to me the safest place because it was peopleless, and people hurt me, but here I was, my first night sleeping on the trail, a girl in a tent among tents of laughing strangers. I knew that mostly men attempted this walk, but I wasn’t sure if I should expect to be alone for days and then to see a man, or if boys would surround me in swirling packs, migrating north with me. From the bed I slept in in the Cinder-block Palace, I’d dreamed the Pacific Crest Trail would provide me solitude, but now I considered more realistically the omnipresence of men, the single danger I couldn’t will myself to ignore. I’d be in wilderness not alone but within the society of my fellow desert pilgrims, a girl among wayward men.

  I ate a dinner of Wheat Thins and mini Snickers inside my tent, knowing as I munched that I wasn’t supposed to eat where I would sleep, as food scents attract wild animals. I didn’t have energy to brush my teeth, just lay down, back against the cool tent floor. I wouldn’t need my sleeping bag tonight, I thought. The air was warm. My spine relaxed into the nylon-covered ground, and I craved creamy comfort food, an ice-cream sundae, a glass of cold chocolate milk. Since the rape I had lived purely off junk. My seven teenage years of eating chicken breast and broccoli now seemed pointless. Monkish. Entirely exhausting. I lay flat on my back, breathing, chain-popping juicy Starbursts, unwrapping them one by one, watermelon Jolly Ranchers, Atomic Fireballs for spice. Lay’s chips for salt. The crap food I loved as a kid but hardly ever indulged in. Now I could have it all. My tent felt safe.

  I pulled out my backpack and rummaged through the things I brought. Just eleven pounds and three ounces. John Muir wrote: I went alone, my outfit consisting of a pair of blankets and a quantity of bread and coffee.

  I became obsessed with this new truth: I needed so little. But for all the so-called necessities I left behind—underpants, a first-aid kit, extra batteries, a warm jacket, a single change of clothes, deodorant or soap, or even a map—I needed to bring lipstick and my new lacy bra. I needed candy. I needed to feel like a woman, to be pretty, even out here in this new world, with no one I knew. Especially here. I needed the candy from my childhood, the sweets I had banned for so long.

  Eleven pounds, three ounces was all I needed to survive, and looking at it in this tent that belonged just to me, I knew I could make it. I’d survived Junior and I didn’t doubt that I’d survive this, too. I didn’t fear that I would die out here. I carried impossibly little, but this was wilderness, the safe playground of childhood summers, and I was strong and also smart, sure that the eleven pounds of things I carried was exactly all that I would need to survive.

  I found my cell phone at the bottom of my backpack. I wanted to call my mom and tell her I had water and shelter, and I was safe. But I had no signal—the satellite phone she mailed me was a five-day walk away, up in Warner Springs. I felt guilty; she’d be so worried tonight she wouldn’t fall asleep. If I had no service tomorrow too, she’d really worry. I curled up small in my tent. I imagined her back in Newton, trying to sleep.

  I pulled my stuffed sleeping bag out and wiggled inside. I made note: the desert is cold at night.

  But I couldn’t fall asleep. I felt chilled. I skimmed my hand over the cold tent floor, feeling for my iPod, hoping the old lyrics of treasured songs would transport me somewhere warm. I pictured a rocky beach, late-summer trips to the Cape with my mom, the smell of sunscreen and washed-up dead crabs and salty air. Dylan, Springsteen, Buffalo Springfield, good old Avril played, randomly ordered. My Pacific Crest Trail playlist. I’d put it all together, desperate to blast away, the soundtrack of escape.

  CHAPTER 6

  UNBOUND GHOSTS

  APRIL 21, HAUSER CREEK, THE DESERT, CALIFORNIA, MILE 16

  I woke that first morning to my body shivering; I was uncomfortably cold, even curled inside my sleeping bag, wearing all my clothes—in southernmost desert. Temperatures wouldn’t get much milder than this, I knew. I hoped I wouldn’t be so cold every night. I opened my eyes to pale green: my small tent’s ceiling. My skin was prickled with goose bumps, my fingernails lilac, the air lonely, smelling of sage and dust, so silent I heard ringing.

  I emerged that day to a pale sky and took my tent down in silence. The aluminum tent poles glittered in the early light—frost clung to them. Even so close to Mexico, the night had really frozen. I used my bandana to shield my hands from the poles as I pulled them apart. The rods gleamed, beautiful; cold metal burned me. I slipped my hands under my shirt and pressed my icy fingers to my stomach. I inhaled and quickly folded them with a metallic clatter and slipped them inside my pack to carry. I packed up my eleven pounds of things into my little lime green gem of a knapsack.

  I was gone before anyone had woken.

  The sun broke over the faraway mountains, now a hazy beige as if stamped on the milky sky, this world an old postcard from bygone years. My shoulders burned even through my thin cotton T-shirt, the sunshine ruthless. Days and nights were distinct creatures now.

  I jogged over the shoeprints of people who’d passed over this ground yesterday, perfectly preserved: the Nike check mark, the swirl of imprinted polka dots. They were stamped into the dust, jeweled with beads of ice and glinting in the new sun. A strong wind would erase them, but the air was still. The footprints all clearly pointed north. The California desert spans a thousand miles, and the PCT twists across seven hundred sun-hardened and dusty miles of it, and it was mesmerizing to consider that I was one in a loose pack, walking the same path.

  I was approaching long-awaited, long-dreamed-of Kickoff, the clotting spot of this dispersed bunch of people, the nomads’ gathering ground. Following this endless path of tracks, hearing their delicate crunch, ice crystals breaking under my weig
ht, I inhaled and felt the thrill of migrating northward through America. Among these tracks might be hidden the ones of a friend, a lover to traverse this mammoth desert with—a tribe. These were my fellow self-exiled American explorers. My new family.

  I felt a pang of longing. I felt hopeful. Back the way I’d come, my train of dust hung in air like solid sun, a personal jet stream. Ahead, unseen, was my long-awaited Lake Morena. Tomorrow Kickoff would begin, and I would have a second chance at my first day at college.

  It was terrifying.

  The California desert was immeasurable, and already I was lonely. In under an hour of jogging, descending, I’d reached Lake Morena, the gathering grounds. But I had been so quick and efficient, so eager to arrive, that I had reached the party grounds thirty-six hours early. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  I saw no lake, just the sign: Lake Morena. It was nailed to a dead tree, flaking paint on wood. A wet lawn sprawled golden in the morning’s still coolness, its patchy yellow grass and pale dirt dewy. Old wood picnic tables sat with nothing on them; iron barbecue grills, planted beside each vacant table; campsites marked by two-foot gray wood posts: 1, 2, 66. Eighty-six altogether. This would be the place, but nobody was here yet. I was the first. It was its own sort of barren Eden, no apples to pick.

  I stood there on Kickoff’s grounds, hoping to feel heightened—wonderful and empowered; instead I felt dizzied, overheated. I was potently uncomfortable in my pale chubby body. I felt transported back to my childhood, the summers of taunting and rejection. More than anything, this felt like the first day of sleepaway camp, my first time away from my mother. She had packed T-shirts and cotton shorts and socks and bucket hats and baseball caps for me, but I’d never dressed myself before. The summer before first grade my mommy bought me ten identical teal cotton sweat suits, and I wore one every day of that school year because, according to her, they “worked.” She would dress me in one the night before, and I’d sleep in it—it also worked for sleeping—and then getting me ready in the morning took just no time at all. I’d dread my classmates’ daily observation: That’s what you wore yesterday!