Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  I had to think out each movement before I made it. He kissed me. Kiss him back, I thought, and I did. I thought of something to say, “Do you like role-playing?” I didn’t know what I’d do if he said yes. “I could be a nurse, or your student?” I asked, hoping it seemed sexy.

  He smiled and pulled back, and said no. “I want to have sex with you,” he said. “No nurse.”

  I smiled and exhaled, relieved. He kissed my forehead and nose and chin, and down. He was so gentle with my breasts that I giggled. Then his face hovered, inches from my shoulder. He said he would be easy. He told me I was sexy, and pretty, and for the first time with a boy, I believed it.

  It truly didn’t hurt.

  I told him that I loved him.

  He turned, faced me completely. “Really?” he said. He seemed incredulous but also very happy.

  “Yes,” I whispered. I laid my head against his rising-falling-rising chest and tried to breathe.

  He held me more firmly then.

  After the rape I wanted to flee; now I felt like staying in that motel bed forever.

  PART II

  The Range of Light

  CHAPTER 11

  LOVE IN THE WOODS

  Morning was a honeyed spill of light, the Bear Room lit by a small skylight. Every cell of my body was buzzing—I’d had sex. I had told him I loved him. A maddening excitedeness consumed me. I floated through the morning.

  I read aloud one of the motel guest book’s sweetest notes to Icecap, but he walked away as I was speaking. I followed him out without finishing the note under my name. He told me he didn’t want to “waste” any more time; we had to get back to the trail quickly to “make miles.” After the comfort of the night before—my first good sex ever—the word waste hurt me. I hardened my posture.

  On the way back to the trail we passed Big Bear City’s small post office. Outside stood a man I recognized, but just barely. After a moment, I knew. Never-Never. This was the first time I’d ever seen Never-Never in the flesh, but it was undeniably him—I recognized him from Facebook photos, and also photos he had sent.

  And now here we were, six months later, in California. He was another faint echo from my college past, haunting me here. In person Never-Never was stumpy, short and balding, shockingly chunky given his active life. His pictures must have been shot from the best possible angles.

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t even want to say hi.

  “I guess we should hug,” I said, or maybe he said it. He seemed gregarious and goofy, physically a little unsure and awkward. He glanced at Icecap, shifting his weight to stoop inward, and quickly hugged me. Then I said I remembered I needed something and jogged over to the post office with Icecap, though I had nothing to pick up there.

  When Icecap and I emerged from the post office, I saw Never-Never with a group and walked away without another look. I already suspected that when he saw I was Icecap’s girlfriend now, he would begin to hate me.

  MAY 10, DEEP CREEK, CALIFORNIA, MILE 306

  Icecap felt the pull of Canada intensely. We couldn’t possibly reach it soon enough. I didn’t understand his rush, but I’d joined myself with him, and so I pushed my body. Together we moved briskly. The day after we made love, Icecap and I walked nineteen miles. The next day, nineteen miles, again. The day after that we walked twenty-six.

  Beneath our quick feet, the path flowed, that river of pale gravel, of snakes, of butterflies and inchworms and dead leaves. Each day’s miles were easier.

  Each night Icecap would ask me if I wanted to have sex again. Each night I’d pause and think—and I would find I really didn’t want to. I thought it was strange—I was very happy walking with him, euphoric sleeping beside him, so lucky. He would lean into me, hoping, but I no longer felt turned on.

  To me, sex now felt irrelevant. Doing it hadn’t actually felt amazing, physically. Making out in Idyllwild had been much more exciting. Sex with him had been beautifully safe and good, but lying beside him sexless did the same thing.

  Each night when he asked me, “To have sex?” I would finally say no.

  And then he’d nod. He never pushed me. He’d never ask me to explain why.

  After each night’s no, he’d hold me, we’d kiss and cuddle, and melt, into dreams.

  We went on like that. Day after day: big miles. Each night: do you want to? No. Okay, hug, kiss, and warm sleeping beside him.

  We strode along the desert trail, the dirt pale orange, and approached a wooden sign. I read aloud: PCT McDonald’s 0.4. Icecap read it, smiling. I was laughing. The word McDonald’s was so strange to see seared into sun-faded wood. After seven more minutes of walking, I emerged beside an interstate, at a rest stop. The golden M branded the big blue sky. I glanced behind, but didn’t see Icecap. I faltered, considered staying, waiting here, but he knew where I’d be.

  I crossed the concrete parking lot to the McDonald’s, feeling self-conscious, nervous my trail smell would offend the people inside. A man dressed in a beige polo shirt and ill-fitting Walmart jeans limped past the row of cars straight toward me. I felt scared until he got closer, nearly at me; he looked kind, his fat cheeks rimmed with deep smile lines. I stopped short and he shuffled right up, eyes widened at the smell of me, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

  I blinked.

  “I know how it is,” he said. “I know. After my father died, I lived in a rickee old shack south’a Mojave. I know it.” His eyes were small and blue. “But look at me now, ’kay? You’ll get back on yer feet. ’Kay?”

  I was holding on to his money, my arm still outreached, as if I’d just taken it. As if I was handing it back. “I’m not,” I said, hoping I’d understood, “I have a home. I’m not homeless, really.” I kept my arm outstretched, waiting for him to snatch the money back. When he only looked at me, directly at my eyes, I thought maybe I should explain that lack of money was not my problem. I’d grown up well off. He needed his twenty dollars more than I did.

  “I know,” he said, “that’s right. I wasn’t either.” He told me I’d want to get something to eat, anyhow. “In case you return and home is gone. You know?”

  Then he shuffled back toward his car. I didn’t know, not really. I felt a little guilty and confused and grateful, too.

  I stood, disoriented, holding the man who was now gone’s twenty dollars. But I wasn’t homeless. I had a home. My parents’ colonial in Newton. My dorm room. Good places to sleep, but maybe not true home. Wrong places. This homelessness he feared on my behalf was actually me on my feet; this homelessness was my safest place now.

  Icecap emerged from the manzanitas—he’d been “cleaning up,” he said. To me he looked the same. I took his hand and we entered the McDonald’s.

  A dozen thru-hikers—what must have looked to normal rest stoppers like a happy gang of bums—overtook the place, their cell phones charging in every available outlet, a hot stink polluting the restaurant air.

  “Is this a homeless retreat?” I heard an older lady with big fake breasts ask the cashier.

  A young, handsome man with silvery hair and emerald eyes, and trim—I imagined he was a Vegas magician—said to the chunky blond cashier, “You can kick hitchhikers out. They don’t pay tolls.”

  “They ain’t,” she replied. “They walk here.”

  The young man with hair like white silk took his coffee. “To McDonald’s?” He pinched his nose, and strutted back outside to a purple convertible, not staying to hear the true, absurd answer.

  Most hikers didn’t even notice the scene, or didn’t care. One, with a huge blond beard, nodded at me. He was cute. I could hear a girl at his loud table call him Surf. I smiled, ordered a parfait, but sat down at a booth sheer across the restaurant from the boisterous group. I wasn’t feeling social. I was too hot and exhausted.

  Icecap tried to order three Big Macs, but they didn’t have hamburgers so early in the morning. Instead he’d gotten the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes Bigger Biscuit breakfast, “the most calories of an
ything on the menu,” he said, and a chocolate-dipped ice-cream cone. Apparently so many hikers had asked for cones and shakes that the McDonald’s manager had turned the ice-cream machine on early.

  “A Big Mac,” Icecap said, picking up the savory sausage patty, which was flat and round, smushed between two hotcakes. He was confused about why they were serving breakfast sandwiches but not hamburgers; they seemed the same—both a “meat sandwich.” He insisted the beef burger patty looked the same as the flat sausage he now held.

  I smiled at his point.

  I deepened my voice, moved my mouth in exaggerated shapes to create twang. “But how’s these bums get here?”

  He laughed. Then he feigned seriousness. “But how do they do it? It is crazy. They’re walking to here?”

  “Yes.” I said, as if I were teaching him. “They are crazy.”

  At the big booth across the McDonald’s, a hiker was completing the twenty-buck challenge: eat twenty dollars’ of McDonald’s food. Icecap had eaten eleven dollars’ worth of food. “Twenty-buck eating competition isn’t so much. It’s easy, actually.”

  “You gonna do it?” I asked him, hoping he’d say no.

  “If I’m hungry for it.”

  For Icecap it was not a competition; it was a possibility.

  But then—again—Icacap was eager to get back to the trail. The day heated, and outside the sand-white air was 95 degrees. I said I wanted to stay and wait out the midday dry heat in the McDonald’s air-conditioning, but he wouldn’t have it. While other hikers were back at the McDonald’s, licking their soft serves, waiting for the high sun to slip behind the mountains, we left the air-conditioned restaurant in midafternoon.

  I hadn’t noticed the trail’s descent down to the McDonald’s, but the climb back up from it, into the mountains, was relentless. The trail zigzagged up toward blue sky, up. My belly was full of sugary yogurt parfait and ice cream and apple juice and a carton of chocolate milk, sloshing in my stomach; my waist cramped, throbbing. Icecap walked fast, faster than usual, unslowed by the unstopping climb, not noticing my pain. We climbed five hundred feet.

  We climbed five hundred more. I ran to stay with him and didn’t complain, though the pain in my waist now looked bluish, like a bruise. Icecap didn’t slow a beat.

  We camped that night on a dusty flat high on the mountain. I was exhausted and didn’t pitch my tent. Instead, I crawled into Icecap’s shelter, curled myself small. My right side was bruised like a snowstorm cloud, shapeless and dark. Icecap pressed his palm against my lower back. “Wild Child,” he whispered. “Wild Child?”

  I didn’t answer. I curled smaller, into myself, into the warmth and rest of necessary sleep.

  “Wild Child,” I heard as I faded from him. He was whispering. He was asking me if I wanted to make love. He was asking me why I never wanted to.

  I curled tighter, ignoring him.

  One blue night Icecap woke me with a pat. I had been dreaming. I’d slept beside him in his tent for the past week. In puppy love, we’d moved in together.

  He patted my back again.

  “Time to hike,” he said.

  I opened my eyes, but it was dark. “It’s nighttime,” I mumbled, rolling over, snuggling down deeper into my sleeping bag.

  This time he shook me. “Time for hiking,” he said. “We can do a thirty today.”

  I didn’t want to hike thirty or more miles that day. “A thirty” was a challenge, a competition without a prize. Hikers who’d done it bragged about it in the registers. That was the only point.

  But I felt no need to accomplish such a thing. I was exhausted. I wanted to rest. Lately, we’d been hiking twenty to twenty-six miles a day; I’d stumble into camp, spent completely, my knees throbbing. Twenty-six miles felt like my limit, a literal daily marathon with a backpack on. I’d been beating myself up to keep up with Icecap’s pace, but now, at whatever damned black morning-night hour it was, all I wanted to do was sink back into my soft sleep.

  So I did. Icecap did, too, it seemed, and the next time he woke me the sky was grapefruit pink. The sun hadn’t yet floated over the far mountains, but Icecap said, “Get up now. We waste time.”

  I rocked upright, lurched onto my hands and knees, and moaned. I mumbled, “Ah. Fine.” I rose and broke camp and walked and tripped my body forward, my legs aflame with lactic acid, heavy and trembling, the early morning world still cool mute blue.

  That morning, my knees both ached. I feared I’d hurt myself. I knew I should listen to my body, tell Icecap I must rest more, but I couldn’t. I hated to debate. He’d say something like, “You can accomplish what you work hard for. If you cannot do it, this is because you can’t work hard.”

  I was passive by nature. I had always been. Arguing felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I was always agreeing even when I didn’t really, instinctively looking for ways to forfeit power, to become more dependent, to be taken care of. I realized how intensely Icecap reminded me of Jacob. They were similar, both diligent and harsh in their judgments—and my big brother’s sureness had always comforted me.

  But as I ran on sore legs to keep up with Icecap, my tendency toward silence stressed me. I knew that if I ignored my knees and inflamed shins, the pain could become chronic. I could develop tendonitis and shin splints, both were common. The only cure for either was a month of rest without hiking and then I’d miss the narrow thru-hiking window. I would effectively end my hike. That would be death. That would be the end for me.

  Still I walked behind him. Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to.

  And every morning after that, Icecap would rise with the first light. Packed, ready to hike, in twenty minutes, tops. Often he would time himself. Sometimes he timed me, but he was consistently disappointed. “Forty-seven minutes!” he reported one morning, stressed. “Too slow for this.” I wondered—maybe he was mad that I wouldn’t have sex with him again and, in his rush, he was beginning to run from me.

  MAY 13, WRIGHTWOOD, CALIFORNIA, MILE 370

  At last Icecap and I came to a wide paved road, and I stuck out my thumb. Down the road was the tiny mountain town of Wrightwood, California, where we planned to eat a hot meal of fajitas or big cheeseburgers and milk shakes at a home-style restaurant. We were starved. We’d get a room for one night and then hitchhike back to that same spot where the trail crossed this road and keep on north from there, resuming our wiggled line of continuous footsteps.

  After a dozen minutes an old mint green truck pulled over and we hopped in the back and it sped off to town. The paved road snaked along the bases of blue and white mountains, through San Bernardino County, down to a pine-shadowed valley. Watching the soft blue peaks recede, the dark trees streak past, I felt so different than whom I’d been down at California’s border with Mexico. I occupied my body. I’d walked 370 miles. I’d stepped over rattlesnake after rattlesnake—they didn’t scare me one twig, anymore—and hitchhiked with strangers and found water and shelter, too, pitching my tent each night, sleeping like a babe regardless of it all. I had finally truly had sex with a boy. I had wanted to. Here I was in the bed of a stranger’s truck, holding Icecap’s arm, swaying gently with the road’s wide bends, against him. The old truck let us out outside a red cottage inn. It was idyllic. Yellow marigolds lined the patchwork-stone walkway to the front door.

  We thanked our ride and offered him gas money, but he encouraged us to keep it. “You’ll be wanting that,” he said. “Have steak and fries.”

  Then I blinked at the inn and he was rolling down the clean gray road, silently drifting around a bend, and gone. So this was Wrightwood. It was beautiful, but I felt disoriented here, off our trail—felt lost. I saw no hikers on the cottage’s tidy lawn. We took our packs off and left them on the red-and-white-painted porch—they stunk and suddenly felt ridiculous—and stepped inside.

  No one was there. There was no bell at the tidy front desk. I called, “Hello,” but then saw beside the old ticking clock a handwritten,
taped-up sign, addressed to thru-hikers:

  Please know we are a small staff and have white towels. PCT folks turn our towels black. There are trail angels in town who all would love to host you.

  Our apologies!

  The Innkeeper

  White Fence Inn

  My stomach tightened, and I felt embarrassed. I walked out the front door. Hikers were outsiders here. We were two ghosts within a very pretty ghost town. “Let’s find the trail angels,” I said to Icecap. He seemed confused. “We can’t stay here,” I said. I picked up my knapsack and kept walking down the road, kept going until we came to the town’s small hardware store. In the shop’s window, a browned handwritten note said: “Welcome hikers! Come in for hiker box with free stuff to swap and register and book of trail angels.”

  Inside it smelled like glue and dust and wood. On the dirty cream-gold carpet, a beat-up cardboard box with Hiker Box written on a flap in Sharpie sat full of crinkly old ramen packets and paper packages of white-creased Lipton Sides and duct tape and grommets—free food and knickknacks hikers who didn’t need them had left for people who might want them. Only a thru-hiker would ever want them. On the linoleum front counter, once red but now so old it appeared pink, a binder lay open—a register. We signed in, lost.

  We read through, hoping to see names we knew, a clue. No one. I was just about to leave and wander farther down the gray-paved road when the front door’s bells jingled and a man walked in and welcomed us. His hands were huge as beavers’ flat tails and filthy. This was his hardware store. He took the binder from Icecap and flipped to the final page, a scratched-up, sleeve-protected sheet that listed Wrightwood’s many trail angels.

  “For a spot to stay,” he said. “For free, you know?”

  The page listed more than twenty names and phone numbers. Some listings were couples, some only men. I picked a couple, Maria and John Moore, and called the number. Maria answered, told us to do our grocery shopping two doors down from the hardware store, and then she’d pick us up out front there in an hour. She’d have dinner ready. Her voice was fast, her accent slight but audible. “I’ll see you two for taco dinner,” she said and then hung up.