Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  I left with Icecap, returned to the van mattress melancholy, aching for something I couldn’t name.

  I would walk with Icecap. We had just one shelter. We had to stay together, now.

  CHAPTER 13

  NO HARM WILL BEFALL YOU

  MAY 20, GREEN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, MILE 478.2

  We emerged at a Pacific Crest Trail trailhead to find a parked minivan with a man inside it, smoking weed from a glass pipe. The man was Boo Henderson. A dozen people at the Figments’ had told us about him. He was a trail angel, patron of the Casa de Luna. He had been waiting there for hikers.

  “There anybody close behind ya?” he asked.

  We didn’t think there was.

  “Then hop in kids!” he said. He said he’d give us a ride to his place, the Casa de Luna. He’d feed us good with some beers and taco salad, homemade.

  Boo’s minivan was pungent with weed. The road hugged the edge of a canyon, switchbacking down into a green valley called Green Valley. He drove slowly, telling us about Green Valley’s essential desert water cache; there was no reliable water for twelve miles north or south without it. Dana Figment used to drive an hour each way several times a week to refill its jugs, until Boo, who lived just down the road from it, convinced her to pass the job off to him. “You gotta make sure it’s filled,” Boo said Dana had told him. “You can never let it go dry.”

  Boo said he’d acted nonchalant, but in truth, he was vigilant. Several years later, someone else offered to take over, but Boo was reluctant. “In the end I was a real uppity dude,” he said and laughed. “But ya got to be dependable.” He packed and lit another bowl, steering with his elbows.

  Boo shuttled us to his house, then turned back to the trailhead to wait for more hikers. “No sir-ee,” he said as we hopped out. “Can’t keep the hikers waiting!” he called, driving back the way he’d come. He did this a handful of times a day for two months of each summer.

  It was late afternoon. A dozen beach chairs dotted Boo’s driveway, hikers lying in all of them. Someone handed us beers and Hawaiian shirts. “Unload. Put your shirt on,” he said. He had straight greasy black hair down to his shoulders, and his breath reeked of liquor. He said his name was Doug. “I’ll be your tour guide of the Magical Manzanita Forest,” he slurred.

  We took our packs off and put our Hawaiian shirts on, maneuvering gracelessly, beer cans in hand. A squat, middle-aged woman named Gracie pulled us over to a banner made from a bedsheet with Casa de Luna 2009 stenciled in bright blue spray paint. She was Boo’s wife, matron of the Casa de Luna.

  “Now we’ve got to get you two’s picture,” Gracie said. “Stand at the banner.”

  Doug counted one, twooo—and Gracie mooned us, her huge butt like a splash of white paint. We gasped, our faces bright and shocked, and the camera flashed.

  “The Casa de Luna,” Gracie said. “You kids are too easy. The house of my moon.”

  “The picture’s good,” Doug said, his eyes amused. “You should see your faces.”

  No hiker around had reacted to the scene at all.

  “It’s always a smile,” Gracie said. “Every damn time!”

  I looked at the display in Doug’s hands. To my surprise, we looked delighted.

  Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

  If Hiker Heaven was a homeless shelter, Casa de Luna was a homeless encampment. “Boo calls it Hiker Daycare,” Doug said, his words slow and indistinct, as Icecap and I followed him out past hammocks strung under the tangled arms of trees, weighted with bodies. It seemed everyone was recovering. Doug led us to where the manzanita woods thickened until we could no longer see the sky, the thick canopy of branches like a woodland fairy’s roof.

  “Welcome,” Doug said. “You are in the Magical Manzanita Forest,” he said, his smile lines deep ruts. Doug deadpanned his words like welcoming people to the manzanita forest was his boring job. The rust orange nest of branches was so low where he stood that he couldn’t straighten his back. “Ya can pitch your tent or put yer backpack into a hammock. Find a spot to sleep. There is more to the tour.”

  He led us to the shower, its floor slick with grease from “the oil wrestling”—it happened nightly—to the basement packed with broken yard chairs and cracked plywood. Amid the stacked junk, Doug pointed at a wide, low figure I couldn’t make out. “The wash-er and the dry-er,” Doug pronounced as if they were foreign words, and then giggled. “Nobody uses them, but it’s parta the tour.” He slipped back out onto the grass. “Spooky in there! I don’t like it.” This was not a place of productivity, only celebrating the endless flow of trailblazers, every day’s light and starlight, too. There was oil wrestling. There was day drinking and wildness and sleep. There was no order.

  That night I paid Gracie to buy me wine, and a hiker named Tattoo Al, a middle-aged retired pro-surfer, went on the booze run and came back with a pink bottle of rosé, for me. “Thanks?” I said. I asked him if he wanted to share it. He didn’t answer but instead unscrewed the cork and poured a big red Solo cup of it, full to the rim, and closed my hands around it. “Thank you,” I said again and he ignored me, strutted over to Billy Goat to talk.

  Icecap stared from across the lawn. Ever since I’d stripped at the hot springs in Warner Springs, Icecap had felt I should stop drinking. He said it muted me. He didn’t like me when I lost myself that way. I hated him for telling me how I should behave as well as how fast I should walk. I looked right at Icecap and took a long drink.

  I turned back into the darkness of the Magical Manzanita Forest, the canopy of branches thickening. I sipped my wine as I walked, thinking about how Tattoo Al had pressed his palms against my fingers. I thought about how he had filled my cup to the brim. I thought about why he might have done that.

  Alarm bells rang. Through the thick buzz of pink wine, I could still hear them. I should be wary. Here was a man singling me out and without even a word beginning to funnel alcohol into me with specific intent. I knew I should be concerned about that. I knew the words, but I couldn’t feel them. Yet I was also giddy at his attention, and at wickedly, gleefully upsetting Icecap.

  In the darkness, I saw that Icecap had already built our tent. I hadn’t helped. I stumbled, tripping and falling onto my palms. I landed on decaying leaves. I didn’t spill my wine. I’d already finished it.

  When I returned it was nearly dinnertime. Gracie Henderson had set up a huge spread of tortilla chips and shredded lettuce, diced tomato and ground beef and yellow nacho cheese from a half-gallon can. “Taco time!” she called out, and we all sprang.

  A mass of hikers swarmed the buffet in an instant. They stood around the driveway, talking, gulping food, their paper plates piled high, limp as tortillas. Everyone was ravenous. I made a plate, moved slowly, feeling drunk.

  Gracie was a gregarious woman, social and loud. She talked to everyone, asking inappropriate questions, giving men sexual compliments. She wore lots of makeup and now sported a furry baby blue costume halo. “I have a devil one, too,” I heard her say to Never-Never when he asked about it. He’d been right behind us on the trail today, apparently. My stomach tightened. After the fire at Hiker Heaven, he’d shrunk in my perception into a man who built his small self up with cruel and cutting jokes made at the expense of others. I didn’t trust him.

  Tattoo Al touched my shoulder—I froze—and filled my wine. The cup still had dirt and leaves in it from when I’d fallen. I swallowed them along with the rosé. It was all so mindless, so easy to slip into passively accepting it. It was given to me, and I took it. I was weak, and I hated myself for my weakness.

  I slipped inside the house to get a cup of water, to try to sober up and maybe find Icecap. No one was in the kitchen. On the fridge, I spotted an old newspaper clipping from the local paper about Gracie and Boo. The story was about how Gracie and Boo got clean from meth and became trail angels. Also stuck on the fridge was a picture of Gracie from the ’80s, before
meth, when she was young. Her eyes had been embers, her cheeks defined by high, delicate bones.

  Back outside, I stepped through the bodies—standing and eating, talking and drinking and doing goofy dances and making funny faces—looking for Gracie. I had to ask her about what happened. I wanted to know why she’d tried meth and if she had been addicted and if it had ruined her face and transformed her into a trail angel and why she made taco salad every night instead of something different. Finally, I found her holding a beer, talking to Tattoo Al and Billy Goat, still sporting her fuzzy, glittery halo. I walked right into the group and interrupted. I touched her arm. “’Scuse me,” I said. My questions felt urgent. “How did you become a trail angel? Is that taco salad your favorite food?” suggested, “We could make spaghetti? I actually know how.”

  She grabbed my butt. I was so shocked I didn’t move. “No,” she answered, making eye contact with me, her eyes stretched too open, comically intense. “I love the smell,” she said and released my butt cheek, which now hurt.

  I could understand stopping here and eating taco salad—of course you would—listening to the story of Casa de Luna’s creation once, and moving on. What I couldn’t understand was making the same dinner every night, and then oil wrestling again. The repetition sounded maddening.

  I stumbled to my backpack, found my satellite phone, and called my mother. As I waited for the call to go through, I saw that Tattoo Al had followed me. I was frightened. Icecap was still back at the party. I didn’t know where he had gone. But now I wanted him here.

  He asked me if I was calling my boyfriend.

  “No,” I said as the phone searched for satellites. I thought of saying, “My boyfriend’s Icecap,” but I didn’t. The satellite phone was ringing.

  “Calling my mom,” I said just as she answered, “Doll!”

  “Hi Mom,” I said.

  “Hi Mommy,” Tattoo Al mocked. He squeezed my shoulder and I looked at the dark ground.

  I told her about Casa de Luna as he looked at me. I couldn’t describe what went on here to her, and yet I tried. I said, “They make the same thing for dinner every night ’cause the hikers like it.” I said, “Taco salad. And then there’s oil wrestling after.”

  Tattoo Al leaned and whispered on my neck, “Look at you. I wouldn’t let my daughter do this trail alone.” He said he had a daughter who was seventeen, said he saw how the degenerates looked at me. Older men, he said. Guys in their thirties and forties. I tried to hear my mother. His mouth hung in the darkness behind my ear.

  “I love you,” my mom said. I wondered if she’d heard Tattoo Al’s low voice. “Have pleasant dreams,” she said, and we hung up.

  Tattoo Al’s face had softened, as if he were concerned. He wasn’t teasing me anymore. Without my mom on the line, I felt less safe. I wanted him to leave.

  I straightened my posture. “I don’t want to oil wrestle,” I said to him though he hadn’t asked. “I’m so sleepy. I’m going to go to bed.”

  “Look at you,” Tattoo Al said. He slipped his fingers behind my hair and cupped my neck. My whole body felt cold. “You are a child,” he said and pressed my neck away. He walked away, through the dark trees.

  I fell asleep that night on a wicker couch out front of the house, not in my new, immaculate two-person tent; I passed out. I was too drunk to feel healthy fear. The party around me twirled, and I could hear in my dreams a hoot and a string of curse words, cheering and a thud. In my drunk stillness I could feel heat against my leg. I opened my eyes. Tattoo Al was sitting on the couch’s edge beside my leg, looking at me. His butt against my shin. Waking me up. Asking if he could have a “sexual favor.”

  “What?” I said. I was shivering.

  His eyes were smiling, as if he were amused. As if he’d told a joke. “Wild Child,” he said, leaning down, over me, down toward my ear, his voice a whisper. “Can I get a sexual favor?”

  I laughed a silent laugh, which was a shudder. I said, “I can’t.” He was sitting on the couch, leaning hard against my legs.

  Tattoo Al suddenly looked disgusted.

  I sat up as if doing a crunch. “I’m sorry,” was all I could say, my face inches from his cheek. Then I stood. I stumbled through the dark trees until I found my tent and ducked inside, relieved to find Icecap there, careful not to wake him.

  The next morning, Icecap and I left Casa de Luna barely speaking. It was clear we weren’t the same anymore. We walked north, into the Mojave Desert, both a little sadder. Icecap continued to push me, refusing to take breaks, but I didn’t bother fighting with him. I was tired. The desert was no longer our own world, only an empty plane of nothingness. It had lost its thrill. The thought of walking the snowy crest of the High Sierra with him had become bleak. We were numb to each other’s pain. He needed to race, wanted to be fearless again. I couldn’t help him. Yet we stayed together.

  MAY 31, KENNEDY MEADOWS, THE GATEWAY TO THE HIGH SIERRA, MILE 702

  We had at last reached the northern edge of the desert. Kennedy Meadows was the last resupply stop before the High Sierra, a clump of wood buildings on dry hills of sand and pine, desolate. The air smelled cold, of snow. The High Sierra would be more beautiful than anything we’d yet walked through, with white lakes glimmering in granite, cold and wild. We were at the gateway to John Muir’s Sierras, the Range of Light “like the wall of some celestial city.” I had expected the mood of the place to be festive, but the hikers here seemed solemn. Thin, bearded men crouched on the general store’s porch, huddled in circles. They smoothed out their fresh maps.

  We went inside to pick up our resupply boxes. He had one, from Anaheim, Texas, sent from his high school host mother, who still told him she loved him, and was logistically supporting his whole hike. I had three, all from my mom. Out on the porch we began to organize our things. It was crowded, everyone packing their fresh sausage and crackers, their guidebooks for navigating 150 miles of signless snow.

  The dozen or so hikers with us here were new to me. We were now at the front of the thru-hiker pack, among the very fittest and fastest.

  Icecap and I spoke softly about the upcoming miles, thrilled and scared as if we were embarking on an older kind of Great American Expedition. I felt like a pioneer. I overheard two older thru-hikers discuss in quiet voices the snow levels in the mountains to the north.

  The High Sierra snow is deepest each year in mid-April—right when we all set out at the Mexican border—and the hope was that, in the two months it usually took to traverse the seven-hundred-mile desert, it would have melted away. But Icecap and I had crossed the desert in just thirty-nine days. Most years the High Sierra “opens” on June fifteenth. Dana Figment warns hikers that to enter before then is stubborn and foolish. She tells John Donovan’s story. But it was the last day of May, and here we were.

  And worse—this was not a normal year. Spring in the California desert had been cooler than usual, in the eighties instead of the low hundreds. This had been a blessing for us earlier—the cooler weather had allowed us to walk faster—but now we’d arrived to mountains that were frozen and white. The safe, familiar path I’d hiked my past two summers was still buried under fifteen to fifty feet of snow. We would need to rely on maps and a compass, neither of which I had. But even with a map and compass, I didn’t trust my navigation skills. I didn’t know how to triangulate. I could never remember how to discern uphill from downhill from the topographic lines, their cryptic, pretty patterns of unfurling blue and white circles. I couldn’t even depend on my GPS, because all I’d learned to do with it was push the button that told me exactly where I already was.

  Icecap and I needed to commit to staying together. We’d have to promise. We’d have to swear on stars. Trying to do this alone would be suicide. The High Sierra Mountains were steep and cliffed, and the rivers that carve their valleys were swift and frigid, deeper than I was tall. They’d be impossible to ford. We’d have to make our own safe routes around them. The snow on the high passes melted in the spr
ing sun and refroze in the night, sheeted with ice. The dangers were real. We were the front of the thru-hiker pack, proud to be the very fastest and strongest hikers, yet we were trapped.

  Of course this was an old American story. Ethan Rarick, who documented the Donner Party’s perilous journey west, told how “Pioneer families left Independence as soon as the warmth of spring gave them dry ground to travel over . . . and—they hoped—reached the temperate climates of the Pacific before the first snows of winter closed the mountain passes.” He wrote that there was “little room for error. The journey was a race against time.”

  A slight middle-aged man named Warner Springs Monty was rallying a group of hikers to skip the snowy High Sierra. His voice was squeaky, like something unhinged. Monty said the Sierra was “deadly” in these conditions, but up north beyond the Sierra, elevations were lower; the snow up there was gone. Monty himself was not a thru-hiker, but he was from the desert town of Warner Springs and had “been hiking for years.” The group of thru-hikers he was organizing would take a ride with Chuck Norris and Tigger up to Donner Pass, land where presumably there would be no snow, and walk back down south. By the time they arrived back at the High Sierra, all this snow would also be melted away.

  Monty preached to the store porch like a glad convert. He’d figured it out; all we need do was follow. Yet I didn’t trust him. He seemed too frantic to be honest, and I didn’t want to stray. My way through was the PCT, buried or not.