Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  I finally reached the bridge, my temples pulsing with adrenaline, my memory extending further—this meadow led to a side-trail I’d once followed down to a sanctuary that could rescue me again. My breath caught, my eyes searching between trees—miraculously falling on the wooden sign I was seeking. It pointed down a steep hill to the right, read: Muir Trail Ranch.

  After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right—I’d found a path in pathless woods. When I was lost and without hope, I’d found again the man who first taught me to trust my own will. When I needed him most, here appeared John Muir.

  But my gut dropped—this was not summer. I was here too early in the season. Muir Trail Ranch was likely closed. I knew that if it was and there was no food at the bottom, I’d never have the strength to climb back up the steep hillside. It would be a long way back, uphill miles.

  My options seemed dismal. The Ranch would be a dangerous gamble. But Muir was a miracle. He was hope in hopeless wild.

  I began to walk down Muir Trail Ranch’s path.

  I strode for an hour down, downhill, letting gravity take me. I thought of thick noodles with garlic cream sauce, marinara sauce, red meat sauce tangy and fatty. I thought of Junior and how if he hadn’t touched me, I wouldn’t be here, a girl in the woods, in trouble. I felt thin and weak yet quick, like a gliding bird. I was overheating, had lost seventeen hundred feet of elevation, so low that the snow had disappeared. I reached a level flat of soil, then a wooden pen—the ranch.

  It seemed no one was there. I stumbled across a flat of damp dirt, muddy, suddenly energized. I was going to give this place every last calorie of hope; there must be food here. Three small naked wood buildings stood. I ran to one, the next, banging and calling at the doors. I screamed loud as my body could, “Please help me!” and fell to my knees in the mud. I was crying. I wasn’t going anywhere. I took my knapsack off right in the muddy grass, let it become damp with filth.

  I heard a motor and smelled gasoline. I thought conjured motor oil must have been the beginnings of my final unhinging. Reality was fading. I saw a tractor, green, with paint chipped like flecks of bark.

  “Miss,” I heard a voice. “Miss, hey-lo. Girlie?”

  I looked up, and the tractor held a man. He’d driven up to me. “I need food,” I said. I had no other words. I began to sob. “I don’t have anything to eat.” I then whispered, “Help me. Take care of me.”

  He looked down at me from his tractor. “You have no food?”

  “No food,” I repeated.

  “Young lady,” he said, climbing down, “I’ll ask inside.”

  I nodded, trembling, squatting in the muddy grass. I pushed myself up to stand, legs wobbling.

  I looked at his cracked hands. “Hungry. I’m very hungry.”

  He was walking, away, saying “I know,” patting the air for me to follow as I stayed standing.

  “C’mon inside,” I heard him say.

  I’d have followed him anywhere. I had been reduced to the mindless slave to what I wanted: food.

  It was dark inside. Before my eyes had adjusted, I smelled onions browning, carrots. “Cooking,” I said slowly. Colors came into view and I saw I was in a cavernous dining room with a woodstove, linen yellow curtains bright with light. In a tall mirror beside the woodstove I saw my hair had grown impossibly long. It curled down to my bottom, overtaking me. The air was warm. I hadn’t felt warm air since the desert south of Kennedy Meadows.

  He was looking at the dark wood wall. He said, “Hey-lo Bonnie! Girl here needs some supper.”

  “Hey-lo Bonnie,” I repeated, and then giggled, dizzy, and a woman appeared. I hadn’t seen her there. She was old and small, pinning cloths up on a clothesline beside the stove. She asked me if I was thru-hiking, said, “You’re early.”

  Yes, I was, I knew. I told her, “It’s pretty here.” I asked if she’d seen Icecap, “Swiss-German boy.”

  She hadn’t. I was the first. “Did you go to Kickoff?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “Should have.” She explained that if I’d gone I would know not to be in the High Sierra now. “Should be mandatory. They give seminars and you’d learn not to hike alone. You pick a partner. And not until there’s no snow below ten thousand feet.”

  She asked if I had money. The ranch was opening the next day, it was a guest ranch, and the cheapest cabin went for three hundred a night. “Yes,” I said, though I had only fifty dollars cash. I had my parents’ credit card, but I doubted she took cards.

  She asked if I knew how to work. “Can you wash windows?” It seemed a strange question. Of course I could.

  “Windows,” I said.

  “You’ll wash these windows.” She pointed to the dining hall’s long row of them. “And keep your money.”

  The unheated cabin bedroom Bonnie gave me in exchange for this small labor was charming. I ran my fingers up and down the porcelain candlestick cup, smooth, a relic from another kind of life.

  Dinner that night was smashed sweet potatoes and glazed pork, root salad with milky cheese and fresh fennel. Loaf after loaf of fresh dense bread. The meal was served family style: me, seven wind-worn ranch hands, and Bonnie. I never stopped eating. They were all kind to me.

  That night I lit my bedside candle, the porcelain glowed orange, and I swaddled myself inside my sleeping bag, under down covers, alone, in a beautiful bed.

  In the morning the ranchers fed me a big breakfast of fried eggs and fried potatoes, and I devoured everything at the table nearest the woodstove. Bonnie brought me fifteen giant PayDay candy bars to fuel me during the forty-nine remaining miles to the town of Mammoth Springs. Then she walked me out, back into the bright cold, the light blinding and described to me how to get back to the PCT.

  Bonnie had saved my life.

  “Send me a postcard from Canada,” she said. She told me not to forget.

  I hugged her and told her I’d remember.

  I was alone again, in an enchanting expanse of frozen ground bright with sunlight, comfortable. I ate one king-size PayDay bar each time my stomach cramped up. They tasted wonderful, each with 440 calories. I was too starved to ration. I emerged back up above timberline, rock-strewn peaks exposed to wind and sky. The High Sierra glittered, virgin. The trail was buried in ice-sheeted snow. Again, nothing marked my way.

  I saw the saddle, the low-point on a distant ridge against sky, and hiked toward it, ascending. Soon the mountainside became a cliff of ice, milky mesmerizing blue, impossible to climb. I hiked along its base to the east. I could no longer see the pass on the skyline.

  I found my GPS and clicked on a topographic map with a small arrow like a V on it, representing my location and orientation, but I didn’t know how to read it. My fingers were windburned and numbing. I needed to keep moving, but I didn’t know which way.

  I found my satellite phone, called my dad.

  He picked up, “Debby?” It was the middle of the day on June 12, the sun high in California. I tried to picture what the day was like in New England’s quiet suburbs, how the light looked, if the sky was gray or sapphire blue. I thought of my old lavender comforter, the clean bright matching curtains with their twirling baby pink and cream-white ballerinas. My bed would be nicely made for me. Hearing Dad’s voice, I missed the comfort of my Newton home.

  I asked if he was at a computer. “Have a minute?” I asked, trying to sound warmer, hoping I seemed calm.

  “I am, yeah,” he said. “At my computer. How’s it going?” I usually didn’t call until past dark, past midnight at the house, but he didn’t sound alarmed to hear from me so early. He sounded tired.

  “Going good,” I said as I clicked through the GPS’s screens: a compass, waypoint spreadsheet, and topographic map, cryptic as ever. I didn’t know if I should tell him I couldn’t read it. I didn’t want to alarm him. I wanted him to think that I was capable, resourceful and able on my own. But I didn’t know which way to go. Northward was a mountai
nside of icicles as large as tree trunks. It was a waterfall, months of compounded icicles. I took a deep breath of freezing air and quietly said, “But I’m a little lost, I think. It’s icy.”

  I heard papers moving, probably work he had to do. It was a Friday. I knew because my GPS told me so, uselessly. My father’s chair creaked. He asked me where I was, “Your coordinates?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to look at them. To me they were only decimals, long and complicated. I pushed the protruding round black button as I did every night when it was time to tell my parents where I was in the world; my latitude and longitude appeared faintly in green. I read them to him. He told me that I was actually literally on the trail. He read me the high pass’s coordinates, Selden Pass, and described how to program them into my GPS as a destination.

  I followed his instructions. The V arrow ticked slowly, settled on a direction. It pointed straight through the wall of blue ice, but if I walked off-course the V would adjust, float to constantly point at the pass. It wouldn’t let me get lost.

  My dad asked me, “Got it? How’s it looking?”

  “Looks good. Thanks,” I said. I didn’t mention Muir Trail Ranch’s Bonnie, the cabin bed and fried eggs, that my mad will had taken me to generous people. That I had mad will. I said only goodbye, hiked; the arrow floated.

  I maneuvered along the base of the frozen cascade of icicles. I felt protected, stronger, like I was on a team, like Bonnie and my father and this GPS I suddenly sort of knew how to use would not allow me to be harmed. For so long, I’d felt only burdened by my satellite phone and the GPS, extra weight I hadn’t wanted. But now I could call my dad and give him the coordinates of my precise global placement, he’d tell me the way I needed to go. I would love him for telling me, for knowing.

  These tools were my parents’ way of saying: What you’re doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way.

  I meandered up Selden Pass, never needing to stop and wonder which way was right. I mounted it; I stood high in sunlit clouds. The north side of the pass was a perfect sheet of untouched snow, steep and glossed with ice, its runoff long and safe, like a thousand-foot-high natural wild slide. It would take hours to hike down this slope tall as a skyscraper, straining my thighs so as not to slip. The effort seemed tedious. This pass was a straight slide, a thrilling shortcut. I tightened my knapsack’s hip-belt, sat down, pushed off against the ice-glazed snow, quick, hard. I glissaded down Selden Pass, the mountain my own gigantic slide, to the flat bottom, shrieking, exhilarated, fine.

  I stumbled to my feet, programmed the next destination into my GPS, Silver Pass, and saved the waypoint. I grinned at my new competence. The sun was falling, blocked by glowing pink clouds, and I walked down into a forest of foxtail pines.

  In the trees, I found a stripe of snow compacted by new footprints. Each print pointed north. I had stumbled back onto the PCT. I turned my GPS off and followed the band of footprints through the snow.

  The trail was clear for a while, scarred with fallen pine needles, but soon the footprints disappeared. But I didn’t retrace my own prints or pull my GPS back out. Instead I kept walking. In that pink light, in those woods, on snow, I felt new confidence. The position of the sun, at my left cheek, told me I was going north. The smooth fold of the foothill told me this was the natural way to walk, the logical place to build a trail. And then as fast as they had disappeared I saw across a field of open white the footprints, a whole crowd of them together, the same band I’d seen before. I jogged down to them, followed their course. The path of tracks thinned to a few, then two, then again none.

  The sun was low. I saw its place. I kept hiking, gliding, fit and light, descending, calm. Again, again, again I found one print or mark or sign and ran to join the team of feet once more. Again the marks of our way would vanish, and I would look for the team of feet again.

  I navigated the Range of Light’s virgin snow, a new mountaineer, hearing John Muir’s words—go quietly, alone—feeling his awe. Ascending Silver Pass I saw no human footprints, only the tracks of a lone bear. They were deep and large, the snow packed beneath the lumbering creature’s weight. I paused and looked around, but didn’t see their maker. I relaxed and fed myself a giant PayDay, my last. I had seventeen miles left to get to food in Mammoth Lakes. I would hike without food but also without fear. I knew I’d make it. My pain was temporary. I could walk through hunger. I thought: Muir survived on stale bread and spring water. I hoped Muir would have been impressed by me—a wild girl traversing the Range of Light.

  I camped that night at the PCT’s junction with Goodale Pass trail, above ten thousand feet, on trackless moon-blue snow. Bright bands of stars twinkled; they were far and kind. That final night before Mammoth Lakes I drank and drank water, filling up my stomach, trying to trick it.

  I woke to the music of my rumbling stomach, powerful as a wildcat’s growl. I had slept in. Sunlight poured through twisted foxtail pines and danced corkscrew shadows, spinning, on my two-person tent’s walls, on my face. I was exhausted, determined, puny and nearly to a mecca of cake and meat.

  Approaching Mammoth Lakes, in the town’s outskirts, I collapsed on the gravel outside of a white and blue Chevron gas station and ate pint after pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I stank of sweat. Tourist families wandered in and out and in, their little girls in Uggs and Juicy sweatpants, pink, candy blue, all similar. They smelled of baby powder and strawberry perfume. They stared. I was shameless.

  I had swagger, now. I had navigated deadly passes, mounted them. I’d faced sixty-four snowy miles without food. I had persisted on faith. And then food came. Because of good people. The world no longer seemed violent and unkind.

  In town I attended restaurants in the order that I saw them. I consumed everything. I devoured pad thai, hot chocolate and wine, French fries and a rare, bloody hamburger. At a diner, eating alone, seated apart from the families, I noticed in the booth’s sliver of mirror that my forehead was marked with something; it looked like a gash, blood dried on it. I saw that my neck had a dark streak, too. I leaned in, examined the dark marks. I grinned, embarrassed. It was dried chocolate ice cream. I not only smelled filthy but looked it, too. I pulled a pine needle from my hair. I had been walking about town, looking feral, Wild Child.

  SEAVEY PASS, THE NORTHERN HIGH SIERRA, MILE 976

  I went back on the trail the next day, happy in the cold once again. I navigated icy passes, quads hot, stabilizing me, ice ax heavy in my uphill arm. I sung in clean air.

  Each night, freezing and lightless, I pitched my tent, one-two, boom-boom, voilà!, delayed getting inside, feeling the cold, blinking at the boundless star-sprayed sky. The stars were specks. I was a speck, too. I shrieked into the charcoal-still and listened to my sound, raw and carnal, echoing through the inky Range of Light.

  I sensed my place. I could feel the presence of the mountains through the blackness.

  Each morning, I woke to light. Silver flakes of mica shimmered, stardust on the pale rock beneath me. I saw the intricate black lace shadow pearl-green lichen cast on stone. Mountain sunlight exposed beauty within beauty. I was high and light with it.

  I slipped up mountains, Muir’s cathedrals, now my home, the mecca that almost took my fragile life. I’d entered his mountains so early, so unprepared. In rock masked by clean snow I should have died. In this daylight I saw: I was the luckiest girl.

  “Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life,” Muir wrote. I wondered which trees Icecap had slipped through, without me.

  Then I stepped over a wood bridge in the forest, out of Muir’s fabled chosen homeland. I had passed finally through the entire Range of Light.

  NONDESCRIPT MEADOW, THE NORTHERN HIGH SIERRA, MILE 1,000

  I was striding through a clearing, a gap in white-bark pines, in sunshine. I felt stronger and faster than I ever had walking with Icecap. If I were with him now I would keep up.

  On the yellow grass I saw white stones placed i
n a loose pattern, a formation as large as a reclined body. I stilled for a moment, looked more closely. They were in the wobbly shape of a 1-0-0-0. One thousand. Stones telling me I had walked one thousand miles.

  CLIMBING SONORA PASS, THE NORTHERN HIGH SIERRA, MILE 1,013

  Ascending Sonora Pass, the Sierra’s final steep and icy climb, I heard someone shriek my trail name. “Wild Child!” It was a woman’s voice, thin and desperate, calling to me. “Wiiild Chiiild, heyyy!”

  I was startled, nearly at the top of the ascent, heart knocking. Sun bounced off the slick slope; I squinted down, saw Silverfox, below me, bounding up the steep snow toward me. Queen bee, queen bee, big bitch, I thought, but I waited for her.

  She was so slender now. So tall. When we’d first met down in the desert, I’d sensed she didn’t want me near her, but now she hunched toward me and grabbed my forearm, held it tight. She was leaning on me. She seemed weaker now, nicer.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Saw your footprints,” she said to me, her breath streams of silver hot air. “I had to catch you.” She confessed she didn’t even care whom the footprints belonged to. “Any other hiker,” she said.

  She had left her trail-boy Boomer and had no maps, just like me. The guys had made fun of her for her dependence on guidebooks and paper, how she was always double-checking. So she’d given her maps up. But without them these past few days she’d been lost more often than not. She needed someone to hike with who knew where they were going.

  “Why’d you get rid of them if you wanted them?” I asked. She ignored me. She was looking right at me. “I haven’t got maps either,” I told her then, because it was true, and because I didn’t want to hike with her.

  “Where’s Icecap?” she asked. “You’re hiking alone now?”

  I was getting cold, the sweat from the climb chilling. “Alone, yes,” I said. I turned and started climbing again. She followed me to the top of the pass, stopped there, the whole pale glittering Sierra beneath us.