Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  That night I dreamed John Donovan wasn’t dead. He had been living with just his yellow backpack all this time. He lived off big acorns and sap. John. John of candles, of wild hope and loneliness.

  MAY 2, 2009, DEER SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA, MILE 184.3

  My first full day alone with Icecap.

  New day brightened. Sun flooded through our little fabric homes as we packed; a wind slid through the gap between the two mounds of pine needle–crisscrossed snow, the snow chilling the wind, white sunshine warming our torsos and our arms, everything hot and amplified. Icecap was packed first, all ready, waiting to flee with me. Edison would be furious. It felt evil and wonderful to ditch him up high on Fuller Ridge. He’d be kicking rocks and shivering, pissing himself with fear. Maybe he’d learn. He’d be sorry he’d been such an ass to me. Icecap had cast Edison away, we left him to traverse Fuller Ridge on his own, in danger.

  Icecap had freed us. I felt he took care of me in ways I couldn’t yet care for myself. I strode downhill. Icecap followed me close, matching my gait though his natural pace was faster, gliding with me through the thawing world. The trail’s stones glittered, flecked with mica, and the dirt path switched back and back under itself, slashing down Fuller Ridge through snow then scrub oak forest, then back down to desert and in 105-degree air. We descended together, gaining oxygen and miles, losing 7,000 feet of elevation.

  The muted desert turned loud with birds and wind. Icecap’s ears popped, and he lowered his voice. From the desert floor, yesterday’s ice-chilled wind and cold granite felt like a dream we’d shared. Now we were down, where we could breathe, just us and the trail through vastness.

  With Icecap the desert no longer felt like a severe and lonely world. It felt pristine and grand, like an ocean we could walk on, bright open water. This was our world, population: two. Whatever we did here would be the culture. The language was English, though words like “rape” and “racing” would fade out of use. I spun and grabbed Icecap’s swinging hand, we kissed. We were solemn, both amazed this was where we were at, that we were here, together. John Muir—my trusted guide—once declared this face of the San Jacinto Mountains we now walked across “the most sublime spectacle to be found anywhere on this earth.” But I could hardly see it.

  I hoped Icecap was my boyfriend. I wasn’t sure. If he was, he was my first. When my high school classmates were at prom, dancing, making out for the first time, I was in New Hampshire’s Appalachian Mountains, building a trail with the Appalachian Mountain Club trail crew. Nobody had asked me to come.

  I wondered if Icecap liked me as much as he liked the beautiful mocha-skinned girl in the school picture he carried. I wondered if he still carried it.

  We walked another twenty miles into a marigold sunset and silk blue night, playing R-rated twenty questions that devolved into what-have-you-done-naughty talk, just talking.

  “Have you ever—had sex?” I asked him, finally. We were walking side by side now, not our usual single file.

  “I did,” he answered me. He grinned. “Did you ever had an orgasm?”

  I hadn’t. I hadn’t felt this at ease with a boy, as happy, since before the rape. I had never been in love. I answered, “No.”

  He was looking at me, smile lines deep. “We’ll fix that.”

  MAY 3, THE DESERT, CALIFORNIA, MILE 209.6

  We traversed vast fields of hills like swells of ocean frozen in their turbulence. Tall white windmills dotted the horizon, and we climbed then descended, then climbed then descended the sea of sand’s smooth waves, infinite waves, the windmills growing, rising higher. We were two dark specks in a metropolis of windmills, shrunken, the great blades rising and turning slowly, each white arm swooshing up to a thousand feet, sweeping blank sky.

  “I hate windmills,” Icecap said as we passed the massive steel base of one, it humming and rattling, wide as a house and tall as a skyscraper.

  I smiled. “Why?”

  He looked upward. “They are loud machines for us,” he declared. “I hate the wind.” His mouth pouted, but when he looked back to me it cracked open into a grin. I thought maybe he was being silly. Windmills seemed a thing too blank and approachable to hate.

  Each windmill’s shadow was a wide stripe of shade. The shadows patterned the hills, dim twigs of cool. Our stomachs growled, our hunger stopped us, and we took a short break by a windmill’s shady base. A scorpion scampered out from beneath a sandstone rock, down the stripe of shade, away, and I ate a granola bar. I ate another. I ate an entire box of crackers and a half a pound of cheese. I craved Creamsicle milkshakes. I craved citrus fruits. I was always hungry. I thought maybe I was starving. I was sick of dry trail food, and I needed to work to eat the 5,000 daily calories my body required to maintain its weight.

  I pulled out my notebook and began a list—“all the things you hate”—making fun of him: THINGS DANIEL HATES.

  Number ONE: windmills,

  TWO: the wind.

  The next day the sky was matte periwinkle, cloudy. The sun was hidden, the air bright and electric, poised to flash. We walked to a wide backroad, faded as in a dream, dirt soft as dust, puffing up in clouds behind me.

  “Sorry,” I said to Icecap, who remained close, dust in his air. “Give me some space, yeah?”

  I glanced back at him, and he was dark with dirt. It stuck to his sweat like the sheen of black tar. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring. He looked hypnotized. He looked crazed.

  “Keeping going to the tiger,” he said, pointing, ignoring me, apparently not bothered by the metallic taste of dust. Now he seemed happy. “Look zis!” He shook his pointing arm.

  I turned and looked and gasped—he was right! A tiger like a sleek sports car stood before us, large and shrewd. It was beautiful. I was frozen. I pressed my eyes closed and opened them, unable to respond. I saw that it was in a long cage, goodness—I unfroze. Then I saw a Saharan lion with a mane like a shock of golden grass. And then, of course, a bear: a humped grizzly. They were wild, fierce and shocking, but they were captive.

  “What is this?” I called out. The tiger, lion, and grizzly all twitched—looked at me. No voice called back an answer.

  “Don’t bother at them,” Icecap whispered, unnerved. “You are too loud here. Sit to watch,” he said.

  I did sit. He sat down, too, and we watched them pace and stretch and sprawl out on concrete ground. The lion sneezed.

  I tried to imagine what all this was, what it was for. The cages sat right beside our winding trail. The first bear I’d seen on this long walk through wilderness was in a cage. Beside a tiger. Beside a lion the size of a horse, shockingly sneezing.

  “For movies,” Icecap said.

  “What?” I said.

  He handed me his open guidebook, pointed. This was a training camp for wild animals in Hollywood movies.

  “Thiz tiger’s famous,” Icecap said again.

  This was a vision of wildness contained—caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.

  Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life.

  Great as these creatures were, they had no power to free themselves and reclaim their bodies. I’d finally begun finding my strength and happiness in the wild, I had the power to move out of the cage he’d put me in, to escape the trap. I saw I was lucky, released in woods, finally no longer caged by my rape, free.

  “I feel like Dorothy Gale,” I whispered to myself out loud, at last. I wasn’t powerless now.

  MAY 6, THE DESERT, CALIFORNIA, MILE 250

  Slipping through oak and yellow pine woods, we came to a clearing in which a La-Z-Boy chair sat. We were no longer disbelieving of such strangeness. The chair’s tan fabric was sun-fa
ded and impossibly clean. Beside it sat a big bucket full of fresh grapefruits, pink and huge, small bright oranges and bulbous mangos.

  I flopped into the plush chair, grinning. “Welcome,” I said. “Step into my office.”

  “How does these fruits get here?” Icecap asked, amazed. He lifted a grapefruit slowly, with two hands. “It is real, actually,” he said. He broke its thick skin with his thumbnail and sweet juice sprayed like silver. It smelled like candy.

  We each ate a grapefruit; it was gone too fast. We then opened two sweet oranges, savored each segment, how the juice sprayed the roofs of our mouths like water balloons bursting. We split a mango. I sat there in my cushioned chair, half reclined, elated and full of just the fruit I’d craved.

  “Best trail magic yet,” I said.

  “Yes, actually. But yes, how does these fruits get to here?”

  The kindness of the trail magic overwhelmed me. The planning and strain the creation of this little oasis required must have been tremendous.

  Someone local must have found the nearest Jeep road and trudged from the place where it ended or switchbacked away, hiked with heavy fruits—and furniture—to the PCT, just to help morale. We couldn’t stop smiling; it was all so unexpected. When we finally left, we were still giddy, high on the kindness and absurdity of the gifts.

  We talked about tomorrow, how we’d reach the trail town of Big Bear, about next summer, how we’d climb frozen waterfalls together somewhere snowy. He hated windmills and the wind, he loved climbing cold mountains. I found his stitch of harshness alluring, his judgments making him more appealing to me. It seemed he knew what he liked and didn’t—he liked me, and he was going somewhere. It was incredibly important that we get there. He took it for granted that I would come with him.

  After just twenty more minutes walking together down the straight, tree-shaded trail, we saw a mustard seed yellow treasure chest—still more magic. I was growing spoiled. I felt high, really, and feared for a moment that I was sleeping, dreaming all I wanted vividly.

  The chest was golden, weighted with candy bars and beers. Inside the chest, along with gold and silver cans of bubbly Coors, a register lay. One note read, “On behalf of mice, thanks much. Nice place you’ve built.” I laughed. I popped a can of beer. Another note was signed with a name I recognized—Never-Never. He wrote, “Cruising at four-and-a-half beers per hour. About to drink and walk. Living dangerously.”

  I felt warm lightness, I felt nothing.

  We were in a clump of trees in a measureless desert, a cool pool of shade and Milky Ways and Coors. Behind the treasure chest of treats a dozen or so gallon milk jugs full of water sat below a sign: For Every Beer, Drink As Much Water. I noticed that on the one swollen three-gallon jug a tiny ladder made of chicken wire and string led up to a cut-out doorway hole the size of a playing card. It was mouse house water, so small critters could drink safely. The teeny ladder was adorable and kind, a contraption straight from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. It tripped my heart. I tipped my beer at it. I proudly signed the register, “Lions and tigers and magic, oh my! Wild Child seeks home.” I lay down with the lugged jugs of mouse house water. The dirt was comfortable and fine.

  Icecap curled up beside me, dry soil sticking to his sweaty skinny legs. He dragged his fingers up and down my hip. I shifted closer to him finally, so close our bodies touched. His fingertips mingled with this strange wonderful magic, leading me deeper into daydreams. Trail magic was filling me with new hope, changing the temperature of my mindset—warming it a hue. I felt lighter, like I’d dropped some needless weight from my backpack.

  I watched Icecap, lost Swiss boy, a wonderful trail gift of his own kind. He belonged with the magic of this forest. Just as the grapefruits made me feel cared for and important, validated, so was he beginning to. They unified in my mind, tugging me forward, past my rape and my despair. Lying in that moment, on dirt, with Icecap, inches from the forests’ most compassionate mouse house—within abundant magic—for the first time since I was raped, I felt lovable.

  I hoped that magic was a shift in my life at large, a reflection of a better place I was reaching.

  In the center of a silent, beige-white desert, a pyramid of hundreds of gallons of water stood at the end of a long, cherry red carpet. Crossing the desert, Icecap and I would periodically find a hundred or so milk jugs full of water, sometimes tied to one another with twine with no note or nametag at all, some displayed creatively, but this place was a vision. Chugging water there, lying on the red carpet, I felt taken care of—and worthy and important—in a way I’d never before and haven’t since.

  MAY 7, BIG BEAR CITY, CALIFORNIA, MILE 274

  After ninety miles together without Edison, Icecap and I emerged into the desert mountain town of Big Bear City. We both needed a break from sleeping on sand and stones. We looked at motel rooms together.

  Audrey, the “motel resort” owner, led us along a wooden plank past the Mountain Lion Room and the Lizard Room to the Bear Room. Inside was spacious, wood-walled: a dark-wood king-size bed and a Jacuzzi beside it, awkwardly close. It was funny. Two dozen stuffed teddy bears, tiny and large, covered the bedside table, the dresser, the wide square rim of the hot tub.

  I used my parents’ card to pay for the Bear Room. “It’s adorable,” I said.

  “Key’s in the door.”

  We left our packs out on the wood boardwalk, shoes out, even our hard sweat-and-grit-crusted socks outside. We wanted to keep our little bedroom nice. Icecap pulled off his shirt and put it in a plastic laundry bag. Then his pants.

  I undressed, too. I slipped off my T-shirt and rolled down my filthy shorts. I unhooked my bra and put it in his hands.

  Icecap glanced at my naked body. He said that he would go do our laundry. He tied a threadbare bleached bath towel around his waist and zipped his rain jacket on. He told me to “get clean,” and walked out into the bright daylight, naked underneath the skimpy towel, just a gust of wind away from indecent. I thought he was bold to go out into the world like that.

  I tiptoed to the bathroom mirror, my feet brown with dirt. I didn’t want to spread my filth over the white plastic-tiled floor. In the scuffed mirror my waist was narrow, but not as small as I wanted it to be. My shoulders and upper arms were marked with a hundred pale half-moons—scars from when I’d pinched myself in the Cinder-block Palace, hating my own body after the rape. Now the scars embarrassed me. I thought I’d have to wear long sleeves for the rest of my life to hide them.

  In the shower I scrubbed; warm water washed off caked dust. More dirt, more dirt. Endless red dirt. I shaved my armpits and legs, and scrubbed them again. Icecap didn’t know, but I think I already knew: I wanted to have sex with him tonight.

  I stepped out wearing no clothes and felt a twinge of dread. I didn’t know what I wanted to happen next. I decide what happens next, I thought. I was nervous—but I wasn’t doubting my desire to sleep with Icecap, it was what I wanted. I wasn’t questioning my reasons, or the timing suddenly—I felt ready. My dread bloomed from a more cerebral fear. It was the question of whether he would still like me as much after, if he’d still want to be as sweet and gentle with me, if he’d stay with me. Or if our shared dreams of distant summers in South America and southern France and on remote frozen waterfalls would abruptly fade.

  I wanted them to last.

  I breathed, stepped out and wrapped myself in an old white towel and hugged myself dry. The towel, I saw, was streaked with reddish brown. There was dirt on me I couldn’t see. I was still dirty. I slipped into the full hot tub and drained it and filled it again over me—the water went tan—and drained it again. My filth’s persistence stunned me. I wondered where Icecap was. I went back into the shower.

  I was struck by the impossibility of getting clean.

  Icecap was still gone and I was missing him. I draped myself across the bed and waited. I rearranged my legs, crossed one ankle over the other, pointed my toes. I waited, got cold, slipped under the cove
rs, the worn sheets cool and smooth against my nude body, and just as I was sinking into soft sleep, the door opened and daylight kissed me awake. Icecap was back, bright with sweat. He stood above two taped-up cardboard boxes: his resupply and—he lifted it to show me—mine, too. He was wearing only a thin small towel, and he had walked not only to the laundry machines out back of the motel—but inside a United States post office.

  “I said I am your boyfriend, and they give it to me,” he said. His lips broadened in a sly smirk. Then he said, “We have to buy groceries to supplement. The Big Bear City’s supermarket will close.”

  I felt at once confused by the leniency of the postal system—that apparently anyone could pick up anyone’s mail here—and delighted. “Boyfriend?” I said, rising up to my knees on the bed, the covers falling off me. I walked on my knees across the bed toward him.

  “Would you like to have sex with me, boyfriend?”

  My chest heated. My entire body pulsed and I gulped the room’s warm air and I choked on nothing and quietly gasped, heart thrashing like a half-drowned bird in me remembering to breathe. I was flushed. He brushed my bare breast with his fingertips and quickly murmured that he’d shower.

  I had a boyfriend. A boy who knew I’d been raped, and yet he didn’t treat me any differently than any other girl, except perhaps that he was careful. He always stopped the moment I whispered, “Stop.” In five minutes, soaked, somewhat less filthy, he returned.

  I leaned into him, pressing my breasts against his chest.

  “Sexy girl,” he whispered. “On your back. Good girl.” He cradled me in his arms and kissed my neck.

  A boyfriend seemed to me the opposite of a rapist. A boyfriend took care of you. A rapist cared less about your entire life than only minutes of his own. A boyfriend gives you affection. A rapist takes you.

  I lay there, limp, unsure of what to say or do.

  “You want to?” he asked softly. “You’re sure? For sex?”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice too loud. “I am.”

  “Good,” he whispered, his lips brushing my ear.