Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  The valley below inked blacker, gone from my view now. After another hour, I turned a bend and emerged to a prow: a flat of rock, our tent built on it, glowing soft yellow amid dimming rock, the black woods pooled below us. He had pitched our tent unsheltered on that high rock in the cold Washington air.

  I noticed a second tent pitched nearby ours: Songbird’s. She was a cute Canadian girl who carried a ukulele and sang songs by Macy Gray and Regina Spektor. I stepped slowly up the moon-white and steep granite slab, to the point—our tent very near the brink of the cliff. I took my shoes off. Dash heard me but didn’t emerge.

  “Dash,” I said softly as I entered. He didn’t answer. I feared he was still angry. I was hit with the scent of pine sap: Nag Champa burning. Dash had stuck it in the dirt floor of our tent’s vestibule. I crawled in where it smoked lovely and sweet.

  On that exposed prow, undressing in the smoke—suddenly scared he was changing—not knowing if we were still fighting—I wanted him to speak.

  He leaned in toward me. I leaned toward him, too—was relieved to see his eyes were smiling brightly. He said nothing. Then he kissed me. On my lips, they parted, with his tongue.

  I hadn’t showered in a week, my curly hair was tied up in one dreadlock-knot on the back of my head, and my ankles were brown with dry dirt, my whole face darkened with filth—I smelled like aged sweat, and yet he wanted my scent and my face, my body.

  Dash was the first person I ever had sex with more than once. I desired sex with him in the way I hadn’t with anyone before him. I felt safe with him. I’d never been in love. I’d never had an orgasm—not even from my own touch. It was as if my body wouldn’t let me have an orgasm until I felt love first, until it knew I wouldn’t get hurt. My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed.

  It started to feel good. I felt consumed, blinded by his fire. He was worthy of devotion—I felt devout. I was high on the climb’s endorphins, fitter than I’d ever been, among the beauty of granite mountains, in love and with a man who could finally make sex good for me. I screamed in pleasure through cool night, my hot call echoing through the dark blue sky, out to the distant silhouetted peaks.

  Afterward, I held his face and kissed him. I wanted to wake up and have breakfast with this man for all the mornings of my life. We were nearing the end of the trail, only weeks from the borderline, and I wanted to cross over with this boy.

  Sun broke our dreaming. We kissed each other ’bye and walked at our own paces; I stopped and took a picture of him, an inky silhouette over blank sky, sun rising. The morning was thick with moisture. Dash was a fleck on the gold sun, drifting. Rumors had been circulating about an imminent snowstorm, and I could feel the cold air in my lungs.

  I climbed the vertical 3,130 feet to the top of Suiattle Pass—hiked twenty-eight miles, a big day. Dash must have hiked even faster because I didn’t catch him that night. We built our camps separately, treading our journeys’ final stretches independently. The last trail-town, a tiny lakeside community called Stehekin—our very final stop before Canada—was nearing.

  A sign appeared. It pointed down a forested hillside, toward the far end of the only road around. Twice daily through the summer, a stout bus would arrive at an opening in the trees below. Through evergreens I saw Dash on an old bench, elbows on thighs, looking at the dirt. I called to him, “Caught you!” It was 2:53—the second bus would come at 3:00 and I was just barely in time.

  Dash was solemn. He told me he feared we might get snowed out of Canada.

  The bus arrived promptly, and we stepped wordlessly aboard.

  The road wasn’t paved, only dirt and mud, and we bumped and swayed down it, chilly, squinting through gold light to try to finally glimpse Stehekin, and sea-blue Lake Chelan. I pressed my fist to the cold glass. The clear wet print of it was a damp window out to trees, green fields bright with dandelions. We saw the faint lake growing, pale blue mountains rising—watching for the tiny pack of villagers living alongside the water—the very last town. We were now at the northwestern tip of America.

  Outside a rose-dotted shock of green—a redwood cottage and its simple garden—we parked. This was the town bakery. Dash gorged himself on cinnamon buns, savory puff pastries, bread glistening with huckleberry jam. I wanted it all—but I took only a few bites from his rich pastries. Soon I wouldn’t be a thru-hiker anymore.

  We found Stehekin had no cell phone reception, and no pavement at all. It was lush, accessible only by floatplane, boat, or foot—and the one bus, down the dirt road, from the clearing we’d both found—just the one way in, from the woods.

  There was one main restaurant, a perfect restaurant. Only one country store, and it had hot chocolate, coffee, milk. And Dash.

  We set up camp in the town’s gorgeous campground, Lake Chelan shimmering through the black trees, long and winding, a blue vein of a lake.

  A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind.

  It was now deep autumn in the mountains.

  Stehekin is a Columbia-Moses word. It means simply “the way through.”

  At the post office the woman was stern with me. I’d come just to pick up the package of food my mother promised she’d send, as usual, along with a final—sixth—pair of running shoes. I hadn’t expected to need this pair, but Washington had proven damp and gritty, the grainy mud tearing up the sneakers’ mesh. At my name the postal worker smirked. “You,” she told me. “Debby.”

  I stood dumbly. We were the only two people in the small office. “Just please sit down,” she said and disappeared into the back. She seemed annoyed with me already.

  But she produced my package quickly—and then another. And another, back, another, back, one more; “There’s more.”

  She carried package after package after package, placing them on the floorboards at my feet. I stayed sitting, a little embarrassed. I wondered if I should offer to help her. I called to her, “I’m sorry.”

  My mother had sent me eight packages—“Eight.” The woman told me it was a Stehekin town record.

  It was also more than I could possibly carry. I couldn’t leave town lugging these extra things. Giving food away, repackaging and mailing everything leftover back to her would stall me—I feared I’d get snowed out. But I had to. At the picnic table outside, feeling angry, I broke open the first—

  It held running shoes. They were carefully stuffed with tissue paper so they wouldn’t become warped. The shoes I wore were darkened with dirt, another five hundred miles of stones and mud, and now both toes poked through, exposed in their filthy socks. My feet ached for support—I needed these shoes desperately.

  I noticed one of the other boxes was identical. Inside was a backup pair of the same shoes, carefully packaged the exact same, a half a size larger than my normal shoe size.

  That pair fit me perfectly.

  A larger box was full of wholesome food: freeze-dried strawberries and mango; green beans and foil-wrapped white Irish cheddar; dark-chocolate calcium supplements and Flintstone vitamins, the purple ones picked out. The best food of any thru-hiker I knew.

  I tore open another—black leather high-heeled pumps, matte and sleek. I’d purchased them for no reason when I was eighteen, at a trail-town in central California, back when I’d hiked away, just weeks after losing my virginity to Tyler, weeks before the rape. Beneath the heels lay a folded cloth that shimmered—a white sequin-encrusted skirt I’d picked out years before that at a teenaged girls’ boutique in Newton Centre, a million miles ago. It glittered in the sun. I remembered I’d once loved it. I’d felt lovely in it—the only skirt I had that I had confidently chosen. I stared blankly at the dress-clothes—remembering.

  Somehow I had forgotten—weeks before, down in Cascade Locks, giddy and silly and wanting Dash to want me, I had actually asked my mother to mail me this pair of heels and sequined ivory skirt. I was ri
diculous.

  My mother had lovingly obeyed me, regardless.

  In heels, I walked through the trees toward a light. A dozen hikers were building a bonfire at the campground. Sparkling in my sequined lace, I fed it branches. My skirt shimmered, the fire leaped, and I pivoted back, twirled; I felt lovely. Songbird plucked at her ukulele, singing Jason Mraz and Macy Gray into the fire shadows, and her voice was agile and sweet. I try to say goodbye and I choke / Try to walk away and I stumble. My mom had mailed much more food than I needed, boxes filled with Clif Bars and bags of dried pineapple and blueberries and walnuts—my pack was bloated—and I broke open bags of roasted nuts, and dried cherries and the most wonderful dark chocolate. I felt fortunate. I began giving away this nourishment I wouldn’t be able to carry. An old hiker from Berkeley, California named Nobody said, “City girl, look at him looking at you. I see you steal that country boy.”

  I saw what he saw—Dash watching me, sweetly smiling.

  I had never lived in a big city, and Dash wasn’t a country boy; he was from Berkeley also. And yet what Nobody said felt perfectly true. Dash and I were stolen away.

  We’d married our souls.

  I smiled back, into the firelight, bright sparks rising—I was so happy—and saw Jacob was there for me in my last breakup, and he had been right. I could trust my brother. I was so heartbroken that I couldn’t trust my brother, that Jacob didn’t care about my life anymore—but he did. Connected by an emotion we had once felt in solidarity, I felt linked with him in a way that I hadn’t in forever. I felt impossibly secure. My posture had changed—maybe even the muscles of my face, and there was no mirror here, but I was sure: at this moment I would be unrecognizable to anybody back in Newton. Confident in my body for the first time on the trail and perhaps in my life, among sweet friends, I felt beautiful—in control of the direction of my life, where I’d go from the place where this trail ended. I was empowered, finally to have chosen my own outfit—and to have my mom support that.

  I thought about the second pair of running shoes she’d sent me here—which fit me better. She cared tremendously. The shoes had reached me just in time to help me complete this journey. I thought, My mother gave me exactly what I needed, and the simple statement made me teary, though it seemed silly to cry, to feel so happy. Tears fell into the fallen leaves. I was grateful for the new cushion and support of the clean shoes, but also—more potently—for her.

  My mother had been good—remarkable. She’d sent all the packages I’d asked for into the middle of nowhere—it must have been terribly expensive—just as she had delivered me everything I’d needed for this whole walk. Shimmering in my skirt, I felt how my mother had sent what I needed—and now also respected what I wanted, even when it was different from what she’d wanted for herself.

  I felt a new sense of freedom that allowed me to see her with empathy, I was no longer stuck.

  Touching my zipper, the white sequins twinkling in the campfire’s golden light, I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.

  The skirt was so wonderfully insane to wear here that it made me shiver—fingering the delicate pearl lace, my strength in my hands.

  I passed around all the food I didn’t need; my friends took it, they were grateful. My hands free, I fed and fed the fire.

  She sent me two pairs of running shoes, knowing my feet had grown.

  The truth was that it wasn’t just luck that I’d found the way to the sign that led me down to salvation at Muir Trail Ranch. The truth was: I’d remembered that fork. I had been there, at that same signpost, twice before that harrowing day I’d nearly starved: the summer before college, happy, I had followed this same sign—the meadow had been different then, snowless: transformed by spring. I had reached Muir Trail Ranch and picked up my mother’s support package from a kind older woman.

  And the year before that, lying to my parents about the Outward Bound alumni trip, I had emerged from the woods, to Aspen Meadow and Muir’s sign. I’d found the ranch then, too.

  My mother had sent me a package there then, too.

  I had always expected to be taken care of and unconditionally loved and supported. Childhood is an inherently narcissistic time, and it was as if all my life I had been a child. I had seen my life from only my perspective. I didn’t want to remain a child—blind to compassion. I sat in the warmth of my last bonfire, among sweet nomads I may soon never see again, and it was as if I was only just finally remembering that I had a privileged history also.

  And my mother had her own history.

  I remembered that Grandma Belle, who had always been so fun to play with, had not truly been an overly loving mother to my mother. My mom had once told me about how Grandma hardly touched her or her little sister and seldom told them, “I love you.” She was both controlling and distant, would yell at my mom when she was a child for small, ridiculous things, like not offering to vacuum.

  Belle was a young mom; she was beautiful, yet cold. She was a stay-at-home mother. Every day, if you asked her, was the worst day of her life.

  My mom used to tell me, “I don’t like my mother, but I love her.”

  She cleaned my room, did my dishes and my laundry, shopped for my clothes and put on my socks each morning. She sent me beautiful bouquets on holidays, on my birthday, when I was sick. She supported my every venture. In a thousand ways she was incredibly wonderful. I knew that everything my mother had ever done for me came from the same sweet place as her tremendous love.

  My mother became the good mother she wished she’d had.

  My mother seemed so pure and vulnerable in her love.

  I could finally see that my mother’s need to take care of me grew from feeling rejected by her own mother. I saw—my mommy didn’t know how to feel loved if she didn’t feel needed.

  I tried to see my rape from my mother’s perspective.

  Perhaps my mother saw my rape as a testament to her own failure to be the good mother she’d been my entire life. I wondered if she feared now that she’d sheltered me too much. She told me to remain silent as if my rape were my shame, but now I wondered if it was hers. She had avoided the difficult conversation, as I had. I understood my mother’s desire for my silence. She was a basically good mother, muted in pain. What I didn’t know was how terribly common that was.

  She thought she was protecting our family—and also me. She was trying to protect me from the rape-shaming she saw in her generation. She wanted to do everything right for me—but couldn’t understand that I could want different things.

  When we apply the lessons we’ve struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment—which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.

  My mother spent eighteen years caring for me and protecting me from hurt, and the minute I left home the worst thing that could have happened happened. It must have devastated her, she couldn’t face it. She needed to avoid it. Because it hurt her too much, too.

  I could feel the heartbreak of the tragedy of the failure of intent, I could see now that mothers who love us can fail us. Her love was still stunningly real.

  On this walk I’d had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother’s influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay.

  I’d asked to walk this trail—which I’d known would terrify her—for the flights and all the money and packages. My mother had done everything I’d asked of her for this walk, right up until these packages in my last trail town. She’d always done just what I’d asked, supported me. So close to Canada, the end, I no longer felt resentment. My resentment became understanding that could also allow gratitude. I saw finally that she was doing all she could.

  Vividly seeing that love had always been my mother’s gu
ide, I could finally release my anger—let go of it there in the woods—and move past it.

  I could see now that her support of this walk, thorough and complete, financial and also logistical—was her supporting me in the best way she knew how. She’d done every single thing I asked of her. This was how my mother knew to love. She provided devoted support with hard, tangible things when she couldn’t with words, or with her ear—and I felt terribly grateful here. I was amazed to find that her continued loyalty to my requests came to mean much more to me in this last trail-town than simply possessing an old skirt.

  I pivoted and spun, adding dead limbs to the bonfire, it surged.

  Our parents do their bests.

  The fact was this walk would have been much harder, maybe impossible without my mother’s care packages. Her support of me had enabled my healing. A colder mother would have let the good world bury me.

  Because I feared I couldn’t walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.

  Childhood is a wilderness.

  CHAPTER 20

  A GIRL IN THE WOODS

  Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.

  —WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

  We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible.

  —GILLES DELEUZE

  A cold storm was forming. The PCT’s weather window was closing, and if we didn’t keep moving north, soon the trail would be buried under snow. My request for the girlish clothing now felt naive and silly. I hadn’t planned properly, and didn’t think about how having these things sent out here would mean I would have to carry an impossible load for the final days on the trail—or I’d need to shed them. I rushed to the post office to send back the extra weight, but repackaging everything in boxes took all afternoon. I’d told Dash I’d be on the two o’clock bus, but I was too slow. I missed it. When I reemerged onto the porch, the bus with Dash was gone.