Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  Five weeks after Junior raped me, I removed the cold still joint stub; a burgundy lipstick stain glared on the lumpy end. I couldn’t throw it away or burn it to smoke and ash. I crushed it in my fingers over a bowl of brownie batter and poured the batter into a pan and brought those not-really-pot brownies to a small party in the on-campus apartments to which a friendly boy with curly hair had invited me. He’d liked me. I acted like a drunk idiot at that party, though I was sober. I ate a brownie. You could hardly taste the ash or trace of weed.

  CHAPTER 7

  MIRAGES

  APRIL 22, THE ANZA-BORREGO DESERT, CALIFORNIA, MILES 38–77.8

  The morning sky was still empty and pale. The wind was loud and cold; I yawned. I shivered. I was overcome by disorienting melancholy. The night before had not been a bad night; I was okay; I was fine. But taking down my tent, I realized I didn’t want to have to see Edison or Icecap. I didn’t feel like talking, I just needed time away from boys. Tears dripped out of my eyes, they were wind tears. The wind tripped me one way, another. I quickly packed my things, boys still asleep.

  Through Icecap’s tent wall I mumble-spoke: “’Bye. I’m leaving now. You’ll catch me later.” He’d catch me soon, I thought.

  I left the two boys sleeping. And then I ran.

  The mesas were windswept, colorless and endless, and I was a small speck of a girl darting across them. The trail north from Pioneer Mail campground grips an ancient eroding mesa edge—hugs the sharp dirt cliff for six exposed miles. I’d found my tribe, I fled it. I was alone again, and soon I would descend to the desert floor—the chalky waterless Anza-Borrego Desert. I noticed the ground was already fully dry again. Amazingly, last night’s rain had entirely vanished.

  I felt the urge to sprint, my body felt freer striding faster. I was terribly shaken, though nothing bad had happened. Intellectually it seemed that I should want to stay with Icecap and Edison. We had all smoked, I had decided to make myself vulnerable to new men, to trust them, and these boys had proven themselves to be worthy of my trust. They hadn’t touched me, nothing bad had happened; I had proven my mother wrong. I had weighed the situation, I’d felt safe, and this had been my chance to remind myself that rape wasn’t normal.

  It seemed that smoking weed with men had confirmed just exactly that which I hoped it would confirm for me. That men could behave better—that strangers could be safe; that hanging out in new places with new boys isn’t inherently stupid or extreme or risky in nature. That girls do this, especially when they’re also with a boy they know, and such girls are not tempting rape. Nothing bad had happened, I’d proven my mother wrong, but I was sad to see how I was wasting this walk already.

  I realized what I was doing out here in this foreign landscape was only a continuation of what I’d been doing when I was inside the Colorado College Inn; I was smoking weed, returning to that place; I’d wanted Icecap’s affirmation just as I’d wanted an unknown man who existed on the Internet, safely far away, to desire me.

  I was disappointed in myself. Weed was an escape path I already knew was fraught. I didn’t come out here to smoke. Obliteration was not what I’d come to wilderness to find. I was on a grand walk hoping to discover my best path forward, my strength, my place in a frightening world. The weed distracted me. I was wasting my own time.

  I was seeking answers in things that weren’t the answer. I’d tried the whole getting annihilated thing in the months after the rape—I’d even woken once in the campus hospital sick from vodka, desolate—and it got me no place good. I didn’t feel good smoking, slipping away from myself. The Pacific Crest Trail was my place to try something different.

  The cells in my forehead were tingling, I was thirsty, I was wanting to be quenched awakened and fulfilled. Weed left me wanting. I no longer wanted boys and weed.

  Walking alone felt better. It felt right.

  I leaned over to the mesa edge, stared down three thousand feet, and my prescription sunglasses lifted like wings, and I gasped; my arm reached out almost before I registered what had happened, a violent jolt, clutched quick at what it knew I absolutely needed. I caught them; I got them. My god. If they had actually blown away I’d be both blind and blinded in the desert sun—stranded. Below me thin canyons undulated like magnified combs of sand, the vast drab desert’s bloodless veins.

  Squinting down at the waterless valley, I remembered something terrible. I had forgotten to top off my Gatorade bottles in the tank of mouse water. I was in a waterless quandary, the oak tree beside the Pioneer Mail campground’s contaminated water was hours out of view now, there was no going back the way I’d come. The next reliable water was supposed to be beside a paved road on the desert floor, about twenty miles along the trail to the north.

  I tried to calm myself. There would be someone who had water. I spun it for myself. Now I’d have to drink less of the dead-mouse water, so this was probably even for the best, I rationalized. I didn’t have to drink that contaminated water. All I’d need to do was become bold enough to ask someone for help. And I could do that. That’s all. It would be easy, something would come.

  I ran north, down. I tried to think. The endless wind pressed me, pushed me, back onto my old footprints.

  I forced myself forward through air that seemed to want to hold me back.

  The mesa I slowly skirted sprawled across the sky, 5,260 feet above the desert valley’s hot mirages, its gold mine ruins and mining-poisoned springs. The air was hot, restless; wind tripped me gracelessly forward, downhill. The valley I approached had been a hideaway for human traffickers back in the 1930s, and in the dirt hills below me, many slaves were slain. In the next seventeen miles I would drop three thousand feet, dramatically descend. The monochrome bio-zone lay at my feet, lifeless. Scanning the expanse below me, I could see no one.

  I drifted down, off the mesa’s cliff edge, into a narrow canyon—shelter from the blasting wind—and out of that canyon, down, into another and another, continuing toward the soundless valley floor. The slope so gradual I hardly noticed I was losing elevation. In silent unison, the plants withered and shrank. I strode long steps, quick even around turns. Mindless momentum. Like when you’re running downhill, striding, striding bigger, bigger bigger—praying you don’t trip. The Anza-Borrego was the true desert, all baked mud, sun drenched and waterless. Something would come. Nineteen-year-olds do not die.

  And soon I saw: I was impossibly lucky. Just ahead on the trail an old man was hobbling forward, bent under the weight of a massive external-frame backpack, staring down at a dust-colored square of paper. He didn’t look like he had the energy to speak. I nodded at him—I knew I needed to ask him for a little water.

  Close, I saw he was frail and had no teeth. Looked like he could snap at the waist. I said, “Hey? How’s it going? Hey, what’s that?”

  He asked, “Dear. Do you have The Water Report?”

  The Water Report? I wasn’t sure what he meant. I asked him carefully, “Do you need water?”

  “No,” he said. “I have it.” I saw his pack was strapped with three full sloshing bottles. “You need The Water Report or you’re going to die, I think.” He unfolded fully the dirty paper, smoothed it with slow hands against his thigh. Extended it out to me. “It’s always accurate,” he said. He sneezed. “It reports just how the water is. Where to drink.”

  I said, “Oh.” I stared at it. “Where’s it from?” I asked. “It’s always right, really?” I felt unsure if he was crazy or a god-sent savior. I straightened, preparing to ask him the embarrassing favor.

  He explained how a trail angel had been handing them out outside the Mount Laguna general store; he didn’t know where I could get one, now. But he was shocked I didn’t have it; it was important. I should copy it down with a pen so I’d have it, so I’d know which water was safe to drink, which was lead contaminated, motor oil contaminated, ripe with E. coli or even Naegleria fowleri. I’d die without it. I needed it, he was absolutely sure. Then, extending his bony arm, he handed
it to me.

  I gripped it, read it quickly; I was joyous! The next water source listed was a long thin natural stream—only a few hours up the trail. It was called San Felipe Creek, and I would make it tonight, although barely. The Water Report promised: the water would flow alongside Banner Grade—a State Route a mile to the north. It would be 250 yards off-trail, north by northwest, trickling beneath a tangle of large, healthy-looking cottonwood trees. At last I knew where I would get to drink.

  I pulled from my pack my Moleskine journal and copied into it the next several water sources—most not listed in The Pacific Crest Trail Data Book at all.

  And then I thanked this kind old feeble man. Newly armed with The Water Report, I felt invincible—charmed, so lucky, and safe again. Again I parted my lips to ask him for a drink of water—and quickly closed them. I felt he’d already given me so much. I felt embarrassed by my lack of planning, my atrocious neglect of myself, and I dreaded revealing to him how absolutely incompetent I was. He’d question me further, like any concerned person would, and of course I would fall short—I’d swiftly wreck his trust in me. He would clearly see I was incapable. I didn’t want to fall in his esteem. I didn’t want him to think so lowly of me. I wanted to act like I was taking care of myself by myself smoothly. I didn’t want this kind old man to see me for what I still was.

  And so, wordlessly, I picked my pack back up. Without asking for a drink, despite his three full sloshing bottles—certainly more than he would need before he reached the trail’s next water source. I said goodbye without ever revealing to him that I was dry. I was very thirsty, disoriented and dizzy, but I walked silently away from the man without taking even a sip.

  By six o’clock my tongue was dry as toast. I had walked twenty-two miles. By seven I’d walked 25.5. The air still weighted with heat. Me: tired. I was stepping over rattlesnakes now as if over shadows; in my thirst-silenced mind they became only bones. Through the hours, the sun and moon shared the flat cobalt sky, both pale in the big beige, quiet and solid. Dusk is persistent in the Anza-Borrego Desert in late April. The moon refuses to set. Moonrise to sunset is as long and bright as an entire northern winter day. Then slate-stone gray, night light, shadow-world. No vision is absolutely clear.

  I strode, numb as a ghost.

  I was hiking through blue dusk, bright with particle haze, when I thought I saw something glowing in the hills. I squinted, and the small light brightened. It looked like a steady sphere of clementine-golden light, drifting with intention over the low and distant hills. I watched it drift; it vanished. The blue air was shimmering, infinite as open water; I watched for the light. I stood there for a while, breathing, the world was silent, leaning in the thick dusk, heart knocking, hoping. But soon enough time had passed that I was no longer sure if I’d imagined the light to begin with. Disappointed, I started walking again.

  And then, soon as I looked back out to the east, I saw something again. Across a low brown mountain as unassuming as a collapsed balloon, a light was floating low over the land, drifting steady and brilliant bright white. It seemed unlikely there was a road out there, there was no place for one to lead to, but I thought that maybe the light was car headlights. It was a pure burning white. Then there was a second light, visible at the same time, this one bigger and bluer, like a star that had fallen and was caught hovering, independent of the smaller whiter light. The white light glided and slipped someplace out of sight. It didn’t fade; it simply was no longer there; the blue star-light remained, slowly growing. I was suddenly scared.

  I wasn’t ever good at intuiting how things worked. I was awful with technology and mechanics, I often encountered things that simply didn’t make clear sense to me, and I resigned myself to the unexplainable and strange. There had always been mysteries in my life—how all the other girls knew the right style to wear; how buildings were built and highways—infinite and everywhere—were so smoothly always there, impressive things I couldn’t comprehend, and so now I simply decided: what I’d seen were only car lights on an old dark road.

  I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted that I couldn’t see, and I accepted that it was there, strange but—from where I stood—a beautiful vision.

  One flattish light was shining. I looked away, west. I had explained away what I was seeing, because my secret fear was that the strange lights were a trick of my own tired vision. I feared that my eyes might be changing strangely. I feared I needed water—now.

  I hoped water would banish the phantom things.

  And when the air became again purely empty, I envisioned a distant bend in the aimless snaking desert road.

  I persisted north thinking, “Where was that team of lights going?” speculating about the destination of a desert route that didn’t exist. I’d been afraid, and so I’d named the phenomenon “car lights”—banal things—which killed my fear. I wasn’t afraid because the unknown force was now explained, and so I was again free to bypass, thoughtless. We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.

  But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.

  The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to the truth of what they were.

  There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.

  It was nearly eight, the sky newly cool, gleaming. The moon a brightening yellow bulb. I saw the desert though a curtain of glittering stones, objects had become shadows. I had noticed a long ink thorn, a horn of darker ground. As I got closer I noticed the shadow-casting thing was smaller than I’d thought; it was hand size, alive and still. Looked like a rock. Some creature.

  In dusk’s permissiveness I wasn’t thinking; I knelt down, picked up the thing, and suddenly, painlessly, my hand was glistening, covered in thick liquid. I blinked. Thought: venom. Thought: do something. Why can’t you ever? Drop it. Run.

  After a milky moment I flung the thing off, its smooth stomach slip-slid like a naked body against steep ice, down, down, maybe to crash, frighteningly soft, like a man’s stomach, sweaty and tender. Like Junior’s sweaty gut. I couldn’t believe I touched it. Its spiky back caught the sand-gold light. I wished I’d brought a first-aid kit, wiped my hand on my dirty bandana and felt dread.

  But, looking at my hand, I saw that I wasn’t actually cut; I wasn’t harmed. The fluid wasn’t mine. The creature had squirted me with two strong streams of its own blood.

  I’d soon learn in my first trail-town that I’d had in my palm a horned lizard, an ancient animal, its surface a shield of raised scales, its resources so primitive that, to defend itself, it increases its own blood pressure enough to rupture the vessels at the corner of its eyes, scaring bad animals away by shooting them with blood. I was the bad animal.

  I had no water left to use to wash the blood from my skin. I was striped with blood, I was thirsty. I couldn’t focus to complete a thought, my thoughts were primitive desperate fragments that led me nowhere.

  I thought: the colored lights had been sweetly dancing. Those drifting lights I’d seen weren’t all the same. Each looked distinct—carrot, bright white, and bluish—independent and unrelated, their movements quick, then slow. I couldn’t make sense of my vision. It could have been a symptom of dehydration—it could have been anything. It was frightening. I had turned away from the east’s vastness, where I suspected the lights still hovered over dusty hills of dry pebbles and silicon dust, violent blue and orange, maddening.

  Sand smog hung like morning vapor over the blackening hills, and I kept walking, trying not to be frightened by the strange magic I had seen in my thirst.

  I didn’t have any water, I needed water, and I had no plan to follow forward, no path out. I was in the mi
ddle of a desert, dry and desperate. I’d left myself dehydrated, hot and overtired, endangered, and I thought I could very well die—and why? What had led me to here? Into the Anza Borrego, alone. What the hell was I—little Debby—trying to do? Crossing a desert alone on foot, what did I expect to happen? I couldn’t remember.

  I was losing sense of my remaining space, and time. I didn’t know the distance to the creek.

  I wished for a tall glass of frothy chocolate milk, made by my mommy. I wished for one of her egg creams, which was chocolate syrup and cold milk plus seltzer and vanilla ice cream scoops. I wished for her to appear here to take care of me, to carry me, in her hands. I wished. On twirls of pallid stars in moonlit air, on the cream moon.

  I persisted past a blood-red cactus flower, another bloom the innocuous color of cream. Somehow these spiny plants had found enough water to blossom, and for a moment I wondered if I could extract water from their flesh, but they were fiercely needled. I wished I could. My vision was blackening.

  Two moonlit cars flashed by—light, gone—and I shivered. At last I saw the actual road. I was too exhausted to feel joy. I passed a strange, shiny wood-and-plastic contraption I could barely distinguish from night’s dark pooling air—an abandoned hermit’s shack, or a mirage. Down the straightaway—the patch of scrawny cottonwoods; The Water Report had very specifically instructed me to “Walk right side of streambed until near these trees.” I jogged to them. But when I arrived at the roadside place where San Felipe Creek was supposed to trickle, precisely where it should have been, I heard no water. Instead, damp dirt gleamed, slicked with a dark rainbow of oil.

  I walked up the slick, back down, pacing it smelling for the coolness of clean water. I didn’t find it. I gripped my hand-scrawled new copy of The Water Report, squinted in the darkness to reread it, furious at it. I skimmed the very top listing: “San Felipe Creek.” And there it was. I was an idiot. I had written at the top of my journal page a long entry that described how the San Felipe Creek was most likely dry by late April—now. The source, I’d further noted, was often tainted by trash and oil. The Water Report suggested that hikers boil any water they do manage to draw from San Felipe Creek. But I didn’t even carry a camping stove. I had written these words: rarely drinkable.