Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  He was still gone, up on the mountain, searching for the glove he’d lost, looking for something to keep five fingers warm while the rest of his body chilled and evening blackened. That idiot. That dumb fanatical nonsensical boy. I crawled into our tent. Our tent? It was my tent, really, wasn’t it? I’d bought it. My parents had paid for it. I wondered if I could keep it, if it would be a fight. If he’d insist on staying with me because of it, despite us. And what would happen if I told him to go. If I kicked him out in the High Sierra. That would be cruel. He’d have nowhere to sleep. I imagined him at night alone, cold, homeless in snow, lying down, dying; I’d feel guilty. No, I couldn’t do that to him.

  He arrived back at Upper Crabtree Meadow only fifteen minutes after me, still without his glove.

  “Goodbye, Wild Child,” he said before I could speak. “I am done with it. You are alone.”

  Tears welled in my eyes and broke and dropped, silent. “’Bye,” I said back, and wandered over to the fire pit and the ring of new hikers huddled around.

  Never-Never was there. He seemed to come with fire—I always saw him by it—as well as an entourage. He was telling jokes, and he was funny, deadpan, making everyone laugh, tonight at Gracie Henderson’s expense. Silverfox was also sitting there with her new trail-boy, Boomer. He was cute and slim and looked Italian. She seemed so different from when I met her in the desert, more girlish, younger—happy with him. She’d commanded his attention yet still ignored me. She hardly even looked. I envied how gentle and loving Boomer seemed with her, his hand wrapping the small of her back. It had been three hundred miles since Icecap had been gentle like that with me.

  I walked back to our tent and saw that Icecap had left without a last hug or a word. He’d left the tent for me, but taken our one set of maps. He’d set off into the frigid and vast High Sierra with no shelter. And I had no guide. We’d both need to fight to survive the 150 miles of snow-covered wilderness before us.

  Terror struck me. I dropped down to my knees, to the dark frozen ground that smelled of pine, so cold against me. Where would he sleep, where would he sleep, where would he sleep? How would I find my way?

  I felt the smack of something, a brutal blow that cracked through my numbness, my ears ringing. This was fear. It was fear that I would die.

  I called Jacob. It was irrational—every attempt to reconnect with him had failed—and still, I wanted badly to hear my brother’s voice. I paced at the meadow’s edge. I was deep into the High Sierra, alone and mapless and confused to find myself feeling hurt, heartbroken. Icecap had been my first boyfriend. I had never thought I’d been in love before. I was already crying. After just two rings, Jacob answered.

  I told him everything. He listened, said softly, “Sorry.” Then he said, “It sucks. It’s going to suck, but it gets better.” He told me the story of his breakup with Amanda, a girl he’d been in love with for two years in college. I remembered Amanda, how tender they’d seemed, how they’d taken a cross-country road trip and how at the end, in Newton, Amanda had given Jacob a scrapbook filled with photos from their trip together. The cover said in script, And let us marry our souls together, and I had never seen my brother so cheery. He probably would have married her if she hadn’t left him.

  At the end of the story he paused. He said, “But I’m in love again. It feels like you’ll never have that with someone else again, but of course you will.” This was not the end for me, he guaranteed. It seemed impossible that he could know for sure, but I trusted him, and so his promise consoled me.

  Until my brother answered, it had seemed that I was the first person ever to feel heartbreak, that no one before me had felt the sadness I felt now. I sniffled into the phone, wiped my nose. “There’s someone else I’ll meet who will love me?” I asked him back. I asked it because I knew he would say yes, and I needed to hear yes from him.

  He answered, “Absolutely.” Absolutely I would be loved.

  “Love you, Jacob,” I told him, as I squinted back at our tent through the blurring dusk. I wasn’t crying anymore. He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.

  I went to our tent and slept alone as Icecap hiked alone and without shelter, north by moonlight. I passed the entire next day at Upper Crabtree Meadow, sitting, watching fire consume wood. I didn’t want to risk running into him again. It felt easier to let him go, to give him time to get away. The morning after, I woke inside the Range of Light, in Muir’s wild cathedral, silent and still.

  My wish to be alone in the mountains would come true. I would traverse the High Sierra, and until I reached the dreamy town of Bend up in central Oregon, I’d hike almost exclusively in solitude.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE RANGE OF LIGHT

  Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

  —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

  —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire.

  —PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON

  Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

  —JOHN MUIR

  JUNE 10, THE HIGH SIERRA, MILE 838

  Fire, shelter—and then the hunt.

  In all directions: snow; sun: white. Silent snow swallowed the world, burying every rock and twig. The snowfields terminated in smooth humps. I feared I’d wandered off the trail; the PCT hadn’t ever been this steep. I looked down, five hundred feet below, at slick and glossy cliffs of ice. I was scared.

  I hoped I was on-course. I needed to find my way through Muir Pass, somewhere 11,955 feet up in thin sky-air. I wasn’t sure which low point between peaks it was. I looked down, forever far, at the bluish ice-cliffs, skyward at the swells of snow, infinite trackless moon-white mounds and edges.

  My toes tingled, cold in my running shoes. I needed to keep them warm. Hypothermia kills more thru-hikers than do bears or wolves, hot springs ripe with deadly Naegleria fowleri or rattlesnakes. When it sets in, basic motor skills and judgment turn off. Our movements become clunky and imprecise. We cannot zip a zipper, move our tongue, speak, think. No pain or burning, just a mounting incompetence. Hiking through the High Sierra, the single most deadly threat is losing enough heat to lose your judgment.

  I climbed higher. The angle of the snow slope increased and its surface slickened, coated at this elevation by a glossy ice crust. I kicked my feet through the crust, punched into powder. I should have been using my ice ax, again willfully underestimating risk.

  Despite the cold I panted and sweat. Two hundred feet above me the vertical appeared to top-off and, kick-step after kick-step, I climbed toward the plateau. But then false top unfolded to false top. Dark clouds sunk and smothered the sun. Pellets of hail, first small, then marble-size, struck my shoulders and bare legs.

  I took a break, sat on the snow, in fog, so high the air itself dizzied me drunk. The snow burned through my spandex. The world turned. I pulled out my shrinking food bag to find I was nearly out of food. I could feel myself slowing and knew I needed fuel to continue forward. I had heard of people pausing too long at this altitude and getting pulmonary edema. These hikers needed to be airlifted out by helicopter, or they’d quickly die.

  I felt an insatiable growl. For hundreds of miles now, I’d been growing smaller, disappearing beneath my clothes; now, that new lightness made me feel vulnerable, precarious. The air blew through me. I was ribs and fading muscle, a desperate body. I shook the food bag. All that fell out were crushed-up cashews and a half-sandwich-size Ziploc of dry oatmeal that I’d found in the Kennedy Meadows hiker box and taken. I tasted it; it was so salty that it was inedible. Someone had mistakenly filled the bag with salt instead of sugar. The only food I had left was useless.

  I
gasped; cold thin air burned. How could I have not planned for this? Stalling by the fire at Upper Crabtree, just hanging out and eating my rationed food in the cold, had been so unbelievably stupid—I still had sixty-four High Sierra miles to walk to the still-warm ski resort town where there’d be pizza and hot cocoa and Ben & Jerry’s. That town could take me up to five days to reach. It was only my third day alone in the Sierra and already I had eaten all my good food. Yet I was so hungry. I could eat all the food I carried, and still starve. And now, because of my irresponsible incompetence, I didn’t even have enough to let my body function. I could really starve.

  What had I been thinking? Why hadn’t I been thinking? I learned this lesson in the desert, had almost died of thirst, promised to do better for myself—how did I walk into this wilderness unprepared, blinding myself again?

  This time, there would be no trail angel miracles to save me, no treasure chests harboring hot meals high in winter-dead mountains. This was a silent white desert of another sort entirely, its version of Hiker Heaven not one you walk back out of.

  I was now 131 miles from the last resupply point, I knew I couldn’t make it back there in time. My only option was to move forward.

  I was nineteen. I repeated my age to myself aloud, as if it were protection against death. I was nineteen, nothing could be so serious. I couldn’t die.

  I continued on, trekking through icy hail that stung my skin. I couldn’t see anything, only white. I had at last reached Muir Pass, but I was too exposed to camp, and I didn’t know which way to go. I plunged downhill toward tree line, hoping the trees would provide warm cover. Every few minutes my heel would punch through the ice and send me into waist-deep powdery snow, heart pounding.

  In frigid time I couldn’t measure, the hail subsided and I broke through the cloud’s lower barrier, out, into afternoon’s pale rosebud light. The snow shimmered, washed golden by the sun. Muir Pass sprawled above me like a grand castle. I stood, cold and disoriented, on level ground at the edge of a long lake. Lake McDermand, I thought it must have been. The snow here was patchy, clumped on rocks’ north faces; damp ground shone black, smelled sweet, safer, but I didn’t see the trail. I couldn’t find it.

  I trudged along the lake’s eastern rim. I breathed, thought: just follow the lake. At some point it had to end—hopefully back on the PCT, if this lake was in fact Lake McDermand, which I needed it to be. Finally I noticed a shadow, pencil-thin and constant, skirting the lake’s western edge: beyond a doubt, the Pacific Crest Trail. I followed the lake’s rim, running, hopping from wet rock to wet rock, relieved and happy.

  But then the lake’s eastern side became a cliff, not high, but if I tried to down-climb and slipped, I’d snap something. I stared down the wet rock ledge, to the bottom. Just twenty feet, if that. I stepped to do it, to down-climb, but then pulled back my foot. I didn’t want to fall. I couldn’t chance it.

  I thought I should go back the way I’d come and descend on the correct side of the lake. But reentering the blinding, freezing cloud seemed like suicide. The sun was falling fast, it was nearly tucked away behind the mountains, and I needed to break into the trees before nightfall to camp.

  The lake was here, near-frozen, rimmed with snow.

  I stepped into the lake.

  I had made a reckless decision. I’d been cold, my body temperature too low, and in my state of hypothermia, I believed that submerging my shivering body in snowmelt to shortcut back to the PCT was a reasonable plan. It was not. I stood in that water, cold as knives, my teeth rattling against each other, biting my tongue, my tongue bleeding. I hadn’t even put on my gloves. Move, I thought, walk through the water. It will be easy. The water was soft and thick, like bedsheets beneath a heavy comforter. I wanted to lie down, float and sleep. No, walk, I thought.

  My heart pounded quickly, faintly, struggling to keep me warm. My bottom half was numb. I felt nothing, no fear of the fact that I was close to freezing. My whole chest throbbed. I stepped through the water. I didn’t stop stepping. I knew how to walk.

  At the western shore I stepped out onto the snow. The trail lay at my feet. I said Thank you, thank you, trail. I tried to run, but tripped. My legs were stiff. I kept pushing. My legs tingled, hot life returning to them.

  The trail was mellow, gradual downhill and well-marked, and I thought I’d beat the sun into the forest. I was going to be all right. The trail neared the edge of Lake McDermand—and then it did something terrible; arching along a stone footbridge, the path crossed back over to the frigid lake’s dry eastern side. I hadn’t needed to cross through the freezing lake. I kicked a rock, devastated by my stupidity, the futility of my pain. I crossed back over the stones, fingernails milk pale. I ran down into the trees.

  Downhill, in pines, day faded to shade, night. Snow twirled and stuck on branches like white fur. I was hungry and cold, and tired of my hunger, of the mental stress of searching for the trail, the constant exhausting attentiveness required to stay on course. The slope’s decline was steep, and I kept slipping, squinting, hoping for a flat spot in the inky pines to pitch my tent. I clicked my headlamp on. My vision became a tunnel of light, of swirling white snowflakes, all trees and rock ground outside of it: blackness.

  I walked through night’s woods, my legs shaking, stomach rumbling like a rock slide, for three miles, more than an hour, before I finally saw a flat clearing. I fell onto it, down on hard ground, pitched my tent kneeling. I crawled inside and took my clothes off. The mountain night air burned me. My sleeping bag and fleece were still damp from the lake-crossing, half-stiff with frost.

  I lay down naked, shivering, rubbing my hands up and down my ribs, starving, remembering my crushed cashews, chewing them gone. My shoulders ached with exhaustion and with stress. I was tired, worn out, too cold and hungry to sleep. Wasting an extra day at Upper Crabtree Meadow had been a mistake. I’d made many mistakes, but this one was irreparable. My mismeasurement was catastrophic. I was alone in vast cold mountains with no food. I had to walk to the next town—sixty-point-five snowy and steep miles north—with nothing to eat.

  I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

  I rose at first light to snow falling. I’d been too cold to sleep. I couldn’t stay. I needed to find food somewhere out here, somehow. I was violent with desire to eat red meat.

  That day I walked ten, twelve, fifteen miles. In total, I’d covered eighty-two miles—the distance from Philadelphia to New York—on nothing but Clif Bars and cashews. I trudged through snow, each step sinking, then over frost-slick rocks, slipping, catching myself without grace, the cold trees glittering. I was spending the very last of my body’s energy on miles that seemed to take me no closer to salvation.

  The trail became buried. Its rutted outline was visible and then very faint beneath new snow, then gone. I ran through trees, downhill to some unnamed place I assumed the path might lead, not thinking about losing it. I ran the way that felt easiest, angry at the trail for being so exhaustingly unreliable when I needed it most.

  Time passed—I couldn’t find the trail again. I was lost and utterly alone.

  I slowed, blinking out cold tears to see the leafless trees, aspens stripped of their gold—at the absolute limit of where this life could take me. I looked at their pale skins like ghosts of what they would become if they lived into spring. They’d blossom, green and gold beauty, if they could only endure this awful winter.

  My stomach growled, a subterranean rumble like a quake. I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it—that “nineteen” didn’t matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal. In a quiet wind, last night’s flakes sifted like fine sugar from a pale tree’s weedlike branches. I’d walked all this way and now it
seemed this very well could be the end of the trail for me, in all senses.

  There had been so many hikers at Upper Crabtree Meadow after we’d finished Whitney; I should have asked Silverfox or Boomer or even Never-Never for extra food. I could have begged. But I didn’t, and now there was no one out here with me. I was now hoping some other hiker would appear with extra food and save me. But I was off the trail. And no one ever came. No trail angels lived here. No boyfriend, no mother.

  Still I walked into the snow, moving to keep warm, burning precious energy searching for an answer I couldn’t think of. I didn’t turn back, compelled to continue without the trail. I didn’t want to risk futilely backtracking. If I couldn’t find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I’d never known I’d had.

  I was no longer following a trail.

  I was learning to follow myself.

  I emerged from the aspen forest into a clearing bordered by peaks: a snowfield—and a distant bridge. Weak and quivering, I stood in snow, within this unrelenting High Sierra dreamscape. I began to sense that I’d been here before. It was a vague ghost of a memory: beneath the pristine snow, this meadow was cut by a side trail I’d once followed.

  I ran across the field, tripping, scanning for clues to confirm I knew this place. I crossed the bridge and, recognizing it, began to remember with impossible elation—I’d crossed this meadow two summers before at seventeen, when I’d lied to my mother about being on an organized trip and hiked these mountains alone. It had been clear of snow then, green and budding. Those were the most liberated weeks of all my teenage years. In a swell of joy I remembered with certainty—this clearing in the woods was called Aspen Meadow. I was not lost.