Wild : From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

8 CORVIDOLOGY

Kennedy Meadows is called the gateway to the High Sierra, and early the next morning I walked through that gate. Doug and Tom accompanied me for the first quarter mile, but then I stopped, telling them to go on ahead because I had to get something from my pack. We embraced and wished one another well, saying goodbye forever or for fifteen minutes, we didn’t know. I leaned against a boulder to lift some of Monster’s weight from my back, watching them go.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn’t needed to get anything from my pack; I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the world’s vastness — hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be — until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before.

I walked in the cool of the morning to the rhythm of my new white ski pole clicking against the trail, feeling the lightened-but-still-ridiculously-heavy weight of Monster shift and settle in. When I’d set off that morning, I thought that it would feel different to be on the trail, that the hiking would be easier. My pack was lighter, after all, not only thanks to Albert’s purge but because I no longer needed to carry more than a couple of bottles of water at a time, now that I’d reached a less arid stretch of the trail. But an hour and a half into the day I stopped for a break, feeling the familiar aches and pains. At the same time, I could ever so slightly feel my body toughening up, just as Greg had promised would happen.

It was day 1 of week 3, officially summer — the last week of June — and I was not only in a different season now, but in different country too, ascending higher in the South Sierra Wilderness. In the forty miles between Kennedy Meadows and Trail Pass, I’d climb from an elevation of just over 6,100 feet to nearly 11,000. Even in the heat of that first afternoon back on the trail, I could feel an edge of cool in the air that would no doubt envelop me at night. There was no question I was in the Sierra now — Muir’s beloved Range of Light. I walked beneath great dark trees that put the smaller plants beneath in almost complete shadow and past wide grassy meadows of wildflowers; I scrambled over snowmelt streams by stepping from one unsteady rock to another, aided by my ski pole. At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.

Doug’s and Tom’s tracks periodically appeared on the alternately muddy and dusty trail, and by midafternoon I came upon them as they sat near a stream, their faces registering surprise when I walked up. I sat next to them and pumped water and we chatted for a while.

“You should camp with us tonight if you catch up with us,” said Tom before they hiked on.

“I already have caught up to you,” I replied, and we laughed.

That evening I strolled into the small clearing where they’d pitched their tents. After dinner, they shared the two beers they’d brought from Kennedy Meadows, giving me swigs as we sat in the dirt bundled in our clothes. As we drank, I wondered which one of them had taken the eleven ultrathin nonlubricated Trojan condoms I’d purchased in Portland a few weeks before. It seemed it had to be one of them.

The next day when I was hiking alone I came to a wide swath of snow on a steep incline, a giant ice-crusted sheath that obliterated the trail. It was like the rockslide, only scarier, a river of ice instead of stones. If I slipped while attempting to cross it, I would slide down the side of the mountain and crash into the boulders far below, or worse, fall farther into who knew what. Air, it seemed, from my vantage point. If I didn’t attempt to cross it, I’d have to go back to Kennedy Meadows. That didn’t seem like an altogether bad idea. And yet here I was.

Hell, I thought. Bloody hell. I took out my ice ax and studied my course, which really only meant standing there for several minutes working up the nerve. I could see that Doug and Tom had made it across, their tracks a series of potholes in the snow. I held my ice ax the way Greg had taught me and stepped into one of the potholes. Its existence made my life both harder and easier. I didn’t have to chip my own steps, but those of the men were awkwardly placed and slippery and sometimes so deep that my boot got trapped inside and I’d lose my balance and fall, my ice ax so unwieldy it felt more like a burden than an aid. Arrest, I kept thinking, imagining what I’d do with the ax if I started to slide down the slope. The snow was different from the snow in Minnesota. In some places it was more ice than flake, so densely packed it reminded me of the hard layer of ice in a freezer that needs defrosting. In other places it gave way, slushier than it first appeared.

I didn’t look at the bank of boulders below until I’d reached the other side of the snow and was standing on the muddy trail, trembling but glad. I knew that little jaunt was only a sample of what lay ahead. If I didn’t opt to get off the trail at Trail Pass to bypass the snow, I’d soon reach Forester Pass, at 13,160 feet the highest point on the PCT. And if I didn’t slip off the side of the mountain while going over that pass, I’d spend the next several weeks crossing nothing but snow. It would be snow far more treacherous than the patch I’d just crossed, but having crossed even this much made what lay ahead more real to me. It told me that I had no choice but to bypass. I wasn’t rightly prepared to be on the PCT in a regular year, let alone a year in which the snow depth measurements were double and triple what they’d been the year before. There hadn’t been a winter as snowy as the previous one since 1983, and there wouldn’t be another for more than a dozen years.

Plus, there wasn’t only the snow to consider. There were also the things related to the snow: the dangerously high rivers and streams I’d need to ford alone, the temperatures that would put me at risk of hypothermia, the reality that I’d have to rely exclusively on my map and compass for long stretches when the trail was concealed by the snow — all of those made more grave by the fact that I was alone. I didn’t have the gear I needed; I didn’t have the knowledge and experience. And because I was solo, I didn’t have a margin for error either. By bailing out like most of the other PCT hikers had, I’d miss the glory of the High Sierra. But if I stayed on the trail, I’d risk my life.

“I’m getting off at Trail Pass,” I told Doug and Tom as we ate dinner that night. I’d hiked all day alone — logging my second fifteen-plus-mile day — but caught up with them again as they made camp. “I’m going to go up to Sierra City and get back on the trail there.”

“We decided to push on,” said Doug.

“We talked about it and we think you should join us,” said Tom.

“Join you?” I asked, peering out from the tunnel of my dark fleece hood. I was wearing all the clothes I’d brought, the temperature down near freezing. Patches of snow surrounded us beneath the trees in spots shaded from the sun.

“It’s not safe for you to go alone,” Doug said.

“Neither one of us would go alone,” said Tom.

“But it’s not safe for any of us to go into the snow. Together or alone,” I said.

“We want to try it,” said Tom.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m touched you’d offer, but I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?” Doug asked.

“Because the point of my trip is that I’m out here to do it alone.”

We were silent for a while then, eating our dinners, each of us cradling a warm pot full of rice or beans or noodles in our gloved hands. I felt sad to say no. Not only because I knew it meant I was opting to bypass the High Sierra, but because as much as I said I wanted to do this trip alone, I was soothed by their company. Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was bound to happen. But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really — all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.

After dinner, I lay in my tent with Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories on my chest, too exhausted to hold the book aloft. It wasn’t only that I was cold and tired from the day’s hike: at this elevation, the air was thinner. And yet I couldn’t exactly fall asleep. In what seemed a fugue state, I thought about what it meant to bypass the High Sierra. It basically ruined everything. All the planning I’d done, the way I’d mapped out the whole summer down to each box and meal. Now I’d be leapfrogging over 450 miles of the trail I’d intended to hike. I’d reach Ashland in early August instead of the middle of September.

“Doug?” I called into the darkness, his tent only an arm’s length from mine.

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking, if I bypass, I could hike all of Oregon instead.” I rolled onto my side to face in the direction of his tent, half wishing he would come lie next to me in mine — that anyone would. It was that same hungry, empty feeling I’d had back in that Mojave motel when I’d wished I had a companion. Not someone to love. Just someone to press my body against. “Do you happen to know how long the trail is in Oregon?”

“About five hundred miles,” he answered.

“That’s perfect,” I said, my heartbeat quickening with the idea before I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

The next afternoon Greg caught up to me just before I reached Trail Pass Trail, my route off the PCT.

“I’m bypassing,” I said to him reluctantly.

“I am too,” he said.

“You are?” I asked with relief and delight.

“It’s way too socked-in up here,” he said, and we looked around at the wind-twisted foxtail pines among the trailside boulders; the mountains and ridges visible miles away under the pure blue sky. The highest point of the trail was only thirty-five trail miles farther on. The summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States, was closer still, a short detour off the PCT.

Together we descended Trail Pass Trail two miles down to a picnic area and campground at Horseshoe Meadows, where we met up with Doug and Tom and hitched a ride into Lone Pine. I hadn’t planned to go there. Some PCT hikers had resupply boxes sent to Lone Pine, but I’d planned to push through to the town of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north. I still had a few days’ worth of food in my bag, but when we reached town I went immediately to a grocery store to replenish my stock. I needed enough to last for the ninety-six-mile section I’d be hiking once I made the bypass, from Sierra City to Belden Town. Afterwards, I found a pay phone and called Lisa and left a message on her answering machine, explaining my new plan as quickly as I could, asking her to send my box addressed to Belden Town immediately and hold all the others until I gave her the details of my new itinerary.

I felt dislocated and melancholy when I hung up the phone, less excited about being in town than I thought I’d be. I walked along the main street until I found the men.

“We’re heading back up,” said Doug, his eyes meeting mine. My chest felt tight as I hugged him and Tom goodbye. I’d come to feel a sort of love for them, but on top of that, I was worried.

“Are you sure you want to go up into the snow?” I asked.

“Are you sure you don’t?” Tom replied.

“You still have your good luck charm,” said Doug, pointing to the black feather he’d given me back in Kennedy Meadows. I’d wedged it into Monster’s frame, up over my right shoulder.

“Something to remember you by,” I said, and we laughed.

After they left, I walked with Greg to the convenience store that doubled as the town’s Greyhound bus station. We passed bars that billed themselves as Old West saloons and shops that had cowboy hats and framed paintings of men astride bucking broncos displayed in their front windows.

“You ever see High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart?” Greg asked.

I shook my head.

“That was made here. Plus lots of other movies. Westerns.”

I nodded, unsurprised. The landscape did in fact look straight out of Hollywood — a high sage-covered flat that was more barren than not, rocky and treeless with a view that went on for miles. The white peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the west cut so dramatically up into the blue sky that they seemed almost unreal to me, a gorgeous façade.

“There’s our ride,” Greg said, pointing to a big Greyhound bus in a parking lot of the store as we approached.

But he was wrong. There were no buses that went all the way to Sierra City, we learned. We’d have to catch a bus that evening and ride seven hours to Reno, Nevada, then take another one for an hour to Truckee, California. From there we’d have no option but to hitchhike the final forty-five miles to Sierra City. We bought two one-way tickets and an armful of snacks and sat on the warm pavement at the edge of the convenience store parking lot waiting for the bus to come. We polished off whole bags of chips and cans of soda while talking. We ran through the Pacific Crest Trail as a conversational topic, through backpacking gear and the record snowpack one more time, through the “ultralight” theories and practices of Ray Jardine and of his followers — who may or may not have misinterpreted the spirit behind those theories and practices — and finally arrived at ourselves. I asked him about his job and life in Tacoma. He had no pets and no kids and a girlfriend he’d been dating a year. She was an avid backpacker too. His life, it was clear, was an ordered and considered thing. It seemed both boring and astounding to me. I didn’t know what mine seemed like to him.

The bus to Reno was nearly empty when we got on at last. I followed Greg to the middle, where we took pairs of seats directly opposite each other across the aisle.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” he said once the bus lurched onto the highway.

“Me too,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. Even when I was exhausted, I could never sleep in moving vehicles of any sort, and I wasn’t exhausted. I was lit up by being back in the world. I stared out the window while Greg slept. Nobody who’d known me for more than a week had any idea where I was. I am en route to Reno, Nevada, I thought with a kind of wonder. I’d never been to Reno. It seemed the most preposterous place for me to be going, dressed as I was and dirty as a dog, my hair dense as a burlap bag. I pulled all the money from my pockets and counted the bills and coins, using my headlamp to see. I had forty-four dollars and seventy-five cents. My heart sank at the paltry sight of it. I’d spent far more money than I’d imagined I would have by now. I hadn’t anticipated stops in Ridgecrest and Lone Pine, nor the bus ticket to Truckee. I wasn’t going to get more money until I reached my next resupply box in Belden Town more than a week from now, and even then it would be only twenty bucks. Greg and I had agreed we’d get rooms in a motel in Sierra City to rest up for a night after our long travels, but I had the sickening feeling I’d have to find a place to camp instead.

There was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t have a credit card. I’d simply have to get through on what I had. I cursed myself for not having put more money in my boxes at the same time that I acknowledged I couldn’t have. I’d put into my boxes all the money I’d had. I’d saved up my tips all winter and spring and sold a good portion of my possessions, and with that money I’d purchased all the food in my boxes and all the gear that had been on that bed in the Mojave motel, and I wrote a check to Lisa to cover postage for the boxes and another check to cover four months of payments on the student loans for the degree I didn’t have that I’d be paying for until I was forty-three. The amount I had left over was the amount I could spend on the PCT.

I put my money back in my pocket, turned my headlamp off, and stared out my window to the west, feeling a sad unease. I was homesick, but I didn’t know if it was for the life I used to have or for the PCT. I could just barely make out the dark silhouette of the Sierra Nevada against the moonlit sky. It looked like that impenetrable wall again, the way it had to me a few years before when I’d first seen it while driving with Paul, but it didn’t feel impenetrable anymore. I could imagine myself on it, in it, part of it. I knew the way it felt to navigate it one step at a time. I would be back on it again as soon as I hiked away from Sierra City. I was bypassing the High Sierra — missing Sequoia and Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir and Desolation wildernesses and so much more — but I’d still be hiking another hundred miles in the Sierra Nevada beyond that, before heading into the Cascade Range.

By the time the bus pulled into the station in Reno at 4 a.m., I hadn’t slept a minute. Greg and I had an hour to kill before the next bus would depart for Truckee, so we wandered blearily through the small casino that adjoined the bus station, our packs strapped to our backs. I was tired but wired, sipping hot Lipton tea from a Styrofoam cup. Greg played blackjack and won three dollars. I fished three quarters out of my pocket, played all three in a slot machine, and lost everything.

Greg gave me a dry, I-told-you-so smile, as if he’d seen that coming.

“Hey, you never know,” I said. “I was in Vegas once — just passing through a couple of years ago — and I put a nickel in a slot machine and won sixty bucks.”

He looked unimpressed.

I went into the women’s restroom. As I brushed my teeth before a fluorescently lit mirror above a bank of sinks, a woman said, “I like your feather,” and pointed to it on my pack.

“Thanks,” I said, our eyes meeting in the mirror. She was pale and brown-eyed with a bumpy nose and a long braid down her back; dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of patched-up cutoff jeans and Birkenstock sandals. “My friend gave it to me,” I mumbled as toothpaste dribbled out of my mouth. It seemed like forever since I’d talked to a woman.

“It’s got to be a corvid,” she said, reaching over to touch it delicately with one finger. “It’s either a raven or a crow, a symbol of the void,” she added, in a mystical tone.

“The void?” I’d asked, crestfallen.

“It’s a good thing,” she said. “It’s the place where things are born, where they begin. Think about how a black hole absorbs energy and then releases it as something new and alive.” She paused, looking meaningfully into my eyes. “My ex-partner is an ornithologist,” she explained in a less ethereal tone. “His area of research is corvidology. His thesis was on ravens and because I have a master’s in English I had to read the fucking thing like ten times, so I know more than I need to about them.” She turned to the mirror and smoothed back her hair. “You on your way to the Rainbow Gathering, by chance?”

“No. I’m—”

“You should come. It’s really cool. The gathering’s up in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest this year, at Toad Lake.”

“I went to the Rainbow Gathering last year, when it was in Wyoming,” I said.

“Right on,” she said in that particular slow-motion way that people say right on. “Happy trails,” she said, and reached over and squeezed my arm. “Corvidology!” she cheered as she headed for the door, giving me and my feather a thumbs-up as she went.

By eight Greg and I were in Truckee. By eleven we were still standing on the hot side of the road trying to hitch a ride to Sierra City.

“HEY!” I yelled maniacally at a VW bus as it whizzed past. We’d been snubbed by at least six of them over the past couple of hours. Not being picked up by those who drove VW buses made me particularly indignant. “Fucking hippies,” I said to Greg.

“I thought you were a hippy,” he said.

“I am. Kind of. But only a little bit.” I sat down on the gravel on the road’s shoulder and retied the lace of my boot, but when I was done I didn’t stand back up. I was dizzy with exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for a day and a half.

“You should walk ahead of me and stand by yourself,” said Greg. “I’d understand. If you were alone you’d have gotten a ride a long time ago.”

“No,” I said, though I knew he was right — a single woman is less threatening than a man-woman pair. People want to help a woman alone. Or try to get in her pants. But we were together for now, so together we stayed until, an hour later, a car stopped and we clambered in and rode to Sierra City. It was a scenic village of less than a dozen wooden buildings perched at an elevation of 4,200 feet. The town was wedged in between the North Yuba River and the towering Sierra Buttes that rose brown against the clear blue sky to the north.

Our ride dropped us at the general store in the town’s center, a quaint old-timey place where tourists sat eating ice-cream cones on the painted front porch, which was abuzz with a pre — Fourth of July weekend crowd.

“You getting a cone?” asked Greg, pulling out a couple of dollars.

“Nah. Maybe later,” I said, keeping my voice light to hide my desperation. I wanted a cone, of course. It was that I didn’t dare purchase one, for fear of not being able to afford a room. When we stepped into the small crowded store, I tried not to look at the food. I stood near the cash register instead, scanning tourist brochures while Greg shopped.

“This entire town was wiped out by an avalanche in 1852,” I told him when he returned, fanning myself with the glossy brochure. “The snow from the Buttes gave way.” He nodded as if he knew this already, licking his chocolate cone. I turned away, the sight of it a small torture to me. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need to find someplace cheap. For tonight, I mean.” The truth was, I needed to find someplace free, but I was too tired to contemplate camping. The last time I’d slept, I’d been on the PCT in the High Sierra.

“How about this,” said Greg, pointing to an old wooden building across the street.

The downstairs was a bar and restaurant; the upstairs had rooms for rent with shared bathrooms. It was only 1:30, but the woman in the bar allowed us to check in early. After I paid for my room I had thirteen dollars left.

“You want to have dinner together downstairs tonight?” Greg asked when we reached our rooms, standing before our side-by-side doors.

“Sure,” I said, blushing lightly. I wasn’t attracted to him, and yet I couldn’t help hoping he was attracted to me, which I knew was absurd. Perhaps he’d been the one who’d taken my condoms. The idea of that sent a thrill through my body.

“You can go first if you’d like,” he said, gesturing down the hall to the bathroom we shared with all of the inhabitants of our floor. We seemed to be the only two occupants so far.

“Thanks,” I said, and unlocked the door to my room and stepped inside. A worn-out antique wooden dresser with a round mirror sat against one wall and a double bed against the other with a rickety night-stand and chair nearby. A bare lightbulb dangled from the ceiling in the center of the room. I set Monster down and sat on the bed. It squealed and sank and wobbled precariously beneath my weight, but it felt excellent anyway. My body almost hurt with pleasure to merely sit on the bed, as if I were being the opposite of burned. The camp chair that doubled as my sleeping pad didn’t offer much cushioning, it turned out. I’d slept deeply most nights on the PCT, but not because I was comfortable: I was simply too spent to care.

I wanted to sleep, but my legs and arms were streaked with dirt; my stench was magnificent. To get into the bed in such a state seemed almost criminal. I hadn’t properly bathed since I’d been at the motel in Ridgecrest nearly two weeks before. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. There wasn’t a shower, only a big porcelain tub with claw feet and a shelf piled high with folded towels. I picked up one of the towels and inhaled its detergent-scented splendor, then took off my clothes and looked at myself in the full-length mirror.

I was a startling sight.

I did not so much look like a woman who had spent the past three weeks backpacking in the wilderness as I did like a woman who had been the victim of a violent and bizarre crime. Bruises that ranged in color from yellow to black lined my arms and legs, my back and rump, as if I’d been beaten with sticks. My hips and shoulders were covered with blisters and rashes, inflamed welts and dark scabs where my skin had broken open from being chafed by my pack. Beneath the bruises and wounds and dirt I could see new ridges of muscle, my flesh taut in places that had recently been soft.

I filled the tub with water and got in and scrubbed myself with a washcloth and soap. Within a few minutes, the water became so dark with the dirt and blood that washed off my body that I drained it and filled it up again.

In the second bath of water I reclined, feeling more grateful than perhaps I ever had for anything. After a while, I examined my feet. They were blistered and battered, a couple of my toenails entirely blackened by now. I touched one and saw that it had come almost entirely loose from my toe. That toe had been excruciating for days, growing ever more swollen, as if my toenail would simply pop off, but now it only hurt a little. When I tugged on the nail, it came off in my hand with one sharp shot of pain. In its place there was a layer of something over my toe that wasn’t quite skin or nail. It was translucent and slightly shiny, like a tiny piece of Saran Wrap.

“I lost a toenail,” I said to Greg at dinner.

“You’re losing toenails?” he asked.

“Only one,” I said glumly, aware that in fact I’d likely lose more and that this was further evidence of my big fat idiocy.

“It probably means your boots are too small,” he said as the waitress approached with two plates of spaghetti and a basket of garlic bread.

I’d planned to order with reserve, especially since I’d spent another fifty cents that afternoon doing laundry, going in together with Greg. But once we sat down I hadn’t been able to keep myself from matching Greg’s every move — ordering a rum and Coke along with dinner, saying yes to the garlic bread. I tried not to let on that I was adding up the bill in my head as we ate. Greg already knew how unprepared I’d been to hike the PCT. He didn’t need to know that there was yet another front on which I was an absolute fool.

But a fool I was. After we got our bill, tacked on a tip, and split it down the middle, I had sixty-five cents.

Back in my room after dinner, I opened The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California to read about the next section of the trail. My next stop was a place called Belden Town, where my resupply box with a twenty-dollar bill inside would be waiting. I could get through to Belden on sixty-five cents, couldn’t I? I’d be in the wilderness, after all, and I wouldn’t have anywhere to spend my money anyway, I reasoned, though still I felt anxious. I wrote Lisa a letter, asking her to purchase and send me a PCT guidebook for the Oregon section of the trail using the bit of money I’d left with her, and reordering the boxes she’d be mailing me for the rest of California. I went over the list again and again, making sure I had it all correct, lining up the miles with the dates and the places.

When I turned off my light and lay on my creaky bed to sleep, I could hear Greg on the other side of the wall shifting around on his creaky bed too, his closeness as palpable as his distance. Hearing him there made me feel so lonely I would’ve howled with pain if I’d let myself. I didn’t know exactly why. I didn’t want anything from him and yet also I wanted everything. What would he do if I knocked on his door? What would I do if he let me in?

I knew what I would do. I’d done it so many times.

“I’m like a guy, sexually,” I’d told a therapist I’d seen a couple of times the year before — a man named Vince who volunteered at a community clinic in downtown Minneapolis where people like me could go to talk to people like him for ten bucks a pop.

“What’s a guy like?” he’d asked.

“Detached,” I said. “Or many of them are, anyway. I’m like that too. Capable of being detached when it comes to sex.” I looked at Vince. He was fortyish with dark hair parted in the middle and feathered like two tidy black wings along the sides of his face. I had nothing for him, but if he’d risen and come across the room and kissed me, I’d have kissed him back. I’d have done anything.

But he didn’t rise. He only nodded without saying anything, his silence conveying both skepticism and faith. “Who detached from you?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling the way I did when I was uncomfortable. I wasn’t exactly looking at him. Instead, I was looking at the framed poster that hung behind him, a black rectangle with a whirl of white that was meant to be the Milky Way. An arrow pointed into its center, above which were written the words YOU ARE HERE. This image had become ubiquitous on T-shirts as well as posters and I always felt mildly irritated by it, unsure of how to take it, whether it was meant to be comical or grave, to indicate the largeness of our lives or the insignificance.

“Nobody’s ever broken up with me, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “I’ve always been the one to end relationships.” My face felt suddenly hot. I realized I was sitting with my arms wound around each other and my legs wrapped around each other too — in a yogic eagle pose, hopelessly twisted. I tried to relax and sit normally, but it was impossible. Reluctantly, I met his eyes. “Is this the part where I tell you about my father?” I asked, laughing falsely.

It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. I hate him, I’d said during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy. There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by, bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we were all going to die right then and there.

Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running through the icy snow. He shut Leif, Karen, and me out of our house a couple of times when we lived in Pennsylvania, when my mother was at work and he was left to care for us and he wanted a break. He ordered us into the back yard and locked the doors, my sister and me holding our barely walking baby brother by his gummy hands. We wandered through the grass weeping and then forgot about being upset and played house and rodeo queen. Later, enraged and bored, we approached the back door and pounded and hollered. I remember the door distinctly and also the three concrete stairs that led up to it, the way I had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window in the upper half.

The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There is his love of Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers. There are the chocolate bars he brought home from his job in a grocery store. There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world. But even that is marred. He said this only when he was trying to woo my mother back, when he was claiming that things would be different now, when he was promising her that he would never again do what he’d done before.

He always did it again. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute.

My mother packed us up and left him and came back, left him and came back. We never went far. There was nowhere for us to go. We didn’t have family nearby, and my mother was too proud to involve her friends. The first battered women’s shelter in the United States didn’t open until 1974, the year my mother finally left my father for good. Instead, we would drive all night long, my sister and me in the back seat, sleeping and waking to the alien green lights of the dashboard, Leif up front with our mom.

The morning would find us home again, our father sober and scrambling eggs, singing that Charlie Rich song before long.

When my mother finally called it quits with him, when I was six, a year after we’d all moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, I wept and begged her not to do it. Divorce seemed to me to be the very worst thing that could happen. In spite of everything, I loved my dad and I knew if my mom divorced him I’d lose him, and I was right. After they broke up the last time, we stayed in Minnesota and he returned to Pennsylvania and only intermittently got in touch. Once or twice a year a letter would arrive, addressed to Karen, Leif, and me, and we’d rip it open, filled with glee. But inside would be a diatribe about our mother, about what a whore she was, what a stupid, mooching welfare bitch. Someday he’d get us all, he promised. Someday we’d pay.

“But we didn’t pay,” I’d said to Vince in our second and final session together. The next time I saw him, he’d explain that he was leaving his position; he’d give me the name and number of another therapist. “After my parents divorced, I realized that my father’s absence from my life was, sadly, a good thing. There weren’t any more violent scenes,” I said. “I mean, imagine my life if I’d been raised by my father.”

“Imagine your life if you’d had a father who loved you as a father should,” Vince countered.

I tried to imagine such a thing, but my mind could not be forced to do it. I couldn’t break it down into a list. I couldn’t land on love or security, confidence or a sense of belonging. A father who loved you as a father should was greater than his parts. He was like the whirl of white on the YOU ARE HERE poster behind Vince’s head. He was one giant inexplicable thing that contained a million other things, and because I’d never had one, I feared I’d never find myself inside that great white swirl.

“What about your stepfather?” Vince asked. He glanced at the notebook on his lap, reading words he’d scrawled, presumably about me.

“Eddie. He detached too,” I said lightly, as if it were nothing to me at all, as if it were almost amusing. “It’s a long story,” I said in the direction of the clock that hung near the YOU ARE THERE poster. “And time’s almost up.”

“Saved by the bell,” Vince said, and we laughed.

I could see the outline of Monster by the dim streetlights that filtered into my room in Sierra City, the feather Doug had given me sticking up from the place where I’d wedged it into my pack’s frame. I thought about corvidology. I wondered if the feather was really a symbol or if it was simply something I hauled along the way. I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. “You’re a seeker,” my mother had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in bed in the hospital, “like me.” But I didn’t know what my mother sought, exactly. Did she? It was the one question I hadn’t asked, but even if she’d told me, I’d have doubted her, pressing her to explain the spiritual realm, asking her how it could be proved. I even doubted things whose truth was verifiable. You should see a therapist, everyone had told me after my mother died, and ultimately — in the depths of my darkest moments the year before the hike — I had. But I didn’t keep the faith. I never did call the other therapist Vince had recommended. I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around my naked body, and, stepping barefoot into the hall, walked past Greg’s door. In the bathroom, I shut the door behind me, turned on the tub’s faucet, and got in. The hot water was like magic, the thunder of it filling the room until I shut it off and there was a silence that seemed more silent than it had before. I lay back against the perfectly angled porcelain and stared at the wall until I heard a knock on the door.

“Yes?” I said, but there was no reply, only the sound of footsteps retreating down the hallway. “Someone’s in here,” I called, though that was obvious. Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

I reached for a washcloth on the shelf near the tub and scrubbed myself with it, though I was already clean. I scrubbed my face and my neck and my throat and my chest and my belly and my back and my rump and my arms and my legs and my feet.

“The first thing I did when each of you was born was kiss every part of you,” my mother used to say to my siblings and me. “I’d count every finger and toe and eyelash,” she’d say. “I’d trace the lines on your hands.”

I didn’t remember it, and yet I’d never forgotten it. It was as much a part of me as my father saying he’d throw me out the window. More.

I lay back and closed my eyes and let my head sink into the water until it covered my face. I got the feeling I used to get as a child when I’d done this very thing: as if the known world of the bathroom had disappeared and become, through the simple act of submersion, a foreign and mysterious place. Its ordinary sounds and sensations turned muted, distant, abstract, while other sounds and sensations not normally heard or registered emerged.

I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.

9 STAYING FOUND

I’d bypassed. Passed by. I was out of danger now. I’d leapfrogged over the snow. It was clear sailing through the rest of California, I supposed. Then through Oregon to Washington. My new destination was a bridge that crossed the Columbia River, which formed the border between the two states. The Bridge of the Gods. It was 1,008 trail miles away; I’d hiked only 170 so far, but my pace was picking up.

In the morning, Greg and I walked out of Sierra City for a mile and a half along the shoulder of the road until we reached the place where it intersected the PCT, then walked together for a few minutes on the trail before pausing to say goodbye.

“That’s called mountain misery,” I said, pointing at the low green bushes that edged the trail. “Or at least that’s what the guidebook says. Let’s hope it’s not literal.”

“I think it might be,” Greg said, and he was right: the trail would rise nearly three thousand feet over the eight miles ahead. I was braced for the day, Monster loaded down with a week’s worth of food. “Good luck,” he said, his brown eyes meeting mine.

“Good luck to you too.” I pulled him into a hard embrace.

“Stay with it, Cheryl,” he said as he turned to go.

“You too,” I called after him, as if he wouldn’t.

Within ten minutes he was out of sight.

I was excited to be back on the trail, 450 PCT miles north of where I’d been. The snowy peaks and high granite cliffs of the High Sierra were no longer in view, but the trail felt the same to me. In many ways, it looked the same too. For all the endless mountain and desert panoramas I’d seen, it was the sight of the two-foot-wide swath of the trail that was the most familiar, the thing upon which my eyes were almost always trained, looking for roots and branches, snakes and stones. Sometimes the trail was sandy, other times rocky or muddy or pebbly or cushioned with layers upon layers of pine needles. It could be black or brown or gray or blond as butterscotch, but it was always the PCT. Home base.

I walked beneath a forest of pine, oak, and incense cedar, then passed through a stand of Douglas firs as the trail switchbacked up and up, seeing no one all that sunny morning as I ascended, though I could feel Greg’s invisible presence. With each mile that feeling waned, as I imagined him getting farther and farther ahead of me, hiking at his customary blazing pace. The trail passed from the shady forest to an exposed ridge, where I could see the canyon below me for miles, the rocky buttes overhead. By midday I was up above seven thousand feet and the trail grew muddy, though it hadn’t rained in days, and finally, when I rounded a bend, I came upon a field of snow. Or rather, what I took to be a field, which implied there was an end to it. I stood at its edge and searched for Greg’s footprints, but saw none. The snow wasn’t on a slope, just a flat among a sparse forest, which was a good thing, since I didn’t have my ice ax any longer. I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town. I didn’t have the money to mail it back to Lisa’s, much to my regret, given its expense, but I wasn’t willing to carry it either, believing I’d have no use for it from here on out.

I jabbed my ski pole into the snow, skidded onto its icy surface, and began to walk, a feat I achieved only intermittently. In some places I skittered over the top of it; in others, my feet crashed through, sometimes forming potholes halfway up to my knees. Before long, the snow was packed into the ankles of my boots, my lower legs so snowburned it felt as if the flesh had been scraped away with a dull knife.

That worried me less than the fact that I couldn’t see the trail because it was buried beneath the snow. The route seemed apparent enough, I assured myself, holding the pages from my guidebook as I walked, pausing to study each word as I went. After an hour, I stopped, suddenly scared. Was I on the PCT? All the while, I’d been searching for the small metal diamond-shaped PCT markers that were occasionally tacked to trees, but I hadn’t seen any. This wasn’t necessarily reason for alarm. I’d learned that the PCT markers were not to be relied upon. On some stretches they appeared every few miles; on others, I’d hike for days without spotting one.

I pulled the topographical map of this area out of my shorts pocket. When I did, the nickel in my pocket came with it and fell into the snow. I reached for it, bending over unsteadily beneath my pack, but the moment my fingers grazed it, the nickel sank deeper and disappeared. I clawed through the snow looking for it, but it was gone.

Now I only had sixty cents.

I remembered the nickel in Vegas, the one with which I’d played the slots and won sixty dollars. I laughed out loud thinking about it, feeling as if these two nickels were connected, though I couldn’t explain why other than to say the daffy thought came to me as I stood there in the snow that day. Maybe losing the nickel was good luck the same way that the black feather that symbolized the void actually meant something positive. Maybe I wasn’t really in the very midst of the thing I’d just worked so hard to avoid. Maybe around the next bend I’d be in the clear.

I was shivering by now, standing in the snow in my shorts and sweat-drenched T-shirt, but I didn’t dare continue on until I got my bearings. I unfolded the guidebook pages and read what the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California had to say about this portion of the trail. “From the trailside ridge, you confront a steady, bush-lined ascent,” it said to describe the place I thought I might have been. “Eventually your trail levels off at an open-forested flat …” I turned in a slow circle, getting a 360-degree view. Was this the open-forested flat? It would seem that the answer would be clear, but it was not. It was only clear that everything was buried in snow.

I reached for my compass, which hung from a cord on the side of my pack near the world’s loudest whistle. I hadn’t used it since the day I was hiking on that road after my first hard week on the trail. I studied it in conjunction with the map and made my best guess about where I might be and walked on, inching forward uncertainly on the snow, alternately skidding across the top or breaking through the surface, my shins and calves growing ever more chafed each time. An hour later I saw a metal diamond that said PACIFIC CREST TRAIL tacked to a snowbound tree, and my body flooded with relief. I still didn’t know precisely where I was, but at least I knew I was on the PCT.

By late afternoon I came to a ridgeline from which I could see down into a deep snow-filled bowl.

“Greg!” I called, to test if he was near. I hadn’t seen a sign of him all day long, but I kept expecting him to appear, hoping the snow would slow him enough that I’d catch him and we could navigate through it together. I heard faint shouts and saw a trio of skiers on an adjoining ridge on the other side of the snowy bowl, close enough to hear, but impossible to reach. They waved their arms in big motions to me and I waved back. They were far enough away and dressed in enough ski gear that I couldn’t make out whether they were male or female.

“Where are we?” I yelled across the snowy expanse.

“What?” I barely heard them yell back.

I repeated the words over and over again—Where are we, Where are we—until my throat grew raw. I knew approximately where I believed myself to be, but I wanted to hear what they’d say, just to be sure. I asked and asked without getting through, so I tried one last time, putting everything I had into it, practically hurling myself off the side of the mountain with the effort, “WHERE ARE WE?”

There was a pause, which told me they’d finally registered my question, and then in unison they yelled back, “CALIFORNIA!”

By the way they fell against one another, I knew they were laughing.

“Thanks,” I called out sarcastically, though my tone was lost in the wind.

They called something back to me that I couldn’t quite make out. They repeated it again and again, but it got muddled each time until finally they shouted out the words one by one and I heard them.

“ARE”

“YOU”

“LOST?”

I thought about it for a moment. If I said yes, they’d rescue me and I’d be done with this godforsaken trail.

“NO,” I roared. I wasn’t lost.

I was screwed.

I looked around at the trees, the waning light slanting through them. It would be evening soon and I’d have to find a place to camp. I would pitch my tent in the snow and wake in the snow and continue on in the snow. This, in spite of everything I’d done to avoid it.

I walked on and eventually found what passed for a fairly cozy spot to pitch a tent when you have no choice but to allow a frozen sheaf of snow beneath a tree to be cozy. When I crawled into my sleeping bag, wearing my rain gear over all my clothes, I was chilly but okay, my water bottles wedged in close beside me so they wouldn’t freeze.

In the morning, the walls of my tent were covered with swirls of frost, condensation from my breath that had frozen in the night. I lay quiet but awake for a while, not ready to confront the snow yet, listening to the songs of birds I couldn’t name. I only knew that the sound of them had become familiar to me. When I sat up and unzipped the door and looked out, I watched the birds flitter from tree to tree, elegant and plain and indifferent to me.

I got my pot and poured water and Better Than Milk into it and stirred, then added some granola and sat eating it near the open door of my tent, hoping that I was still on the PCT. I stood and washed out my pot with a handful of snow and scanned the landscape. I was surrounded by rocks and trees that jutted out from the icy snow. I felt both uneasy about my situation and astounded by the vast lonesome beauty. Should I continue on or turn back? I wondered, though I knew my answer. I could feel it lodged in my gut: of course I was continuing on. I’d worked too hard to get here to do otherwise. Turning back made logical sense. I could retrace my steps to Sierra City and catch another ride farther north still, clear of the snow. It was safe. It was reasonable. It was probably the right thing to do. But nothing in me would do it.

I walked all day, falling and skidding and trudging along, bracing so hard with my ski pole that my hand blistered. I switched to the other hand and it blistered too. Around every bend and over every ridge and on the other side of every meadow I hoped there would be no more snow. But there was always more snow amid the occasional patches where the ground was visible. Is that the PCT? I’d wonder when I saw the actual ground. I could never be certain. Only time would tell.

I sweated as I hiked, the whole backside of me wet where my pack covered my body, regardless of the temperature or what clothing I wore. When I stopped, I began shivering within minutes, my wet clothes suddenly icy cold. My muscles had at last begun to adjust to the demands of long-distance hiking, but now new demands were placed on them, and not only to brace myself in the constant effort to stay upright. If the ground upon which I was walking was on a slope, I had to chop out each step in order to get my footing, lest I slip down the mountain and crash into the rocks and bushes and trees below, or worse, go sailing over the edge. Methodically, I kicked into the snow’s icy crust, making footholds step by step. I remembered Greg teaching me how to do this very thing with my ice ax back in Kennedy Meadows. Now I wished for that ice ax with an almost pathological fervor, picturing it sitting uselessly in the PCT hiker free box in Sierra City. With all the kicking and bracing, my feet blistered in new places as well as in all the old places that had blistered back in my first days of hiking, the flesh on my hips and shoulders still rubbed raw by Monster’s straps.

I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow. I’d generally been covering two miles an hour as I hiked most days, but everything was different in the snow: slower, less certain. I thought it would take me six days to reach Belden Town, but when I’d packed my food bag with six days’ worth of food, I didn’t have any idea what I’d encounter. Six days in these conditions were out of the question, and not only for the physical challenge of moving through the snow. Each step was also a calculated effort to stay approximately on what I hoped was the PCT. With my map and compass in hand, I tried to remember all I could from Staying Found, which I’d burned long ago. Many of the techniques — triangulating and cross bearing and bracketing — had perplexed me even when I’d been holding the book in my hand. Now they were impossible to do with any confidence. I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. So mostly I relied on the narrative descriptions in my guidebook, reading them over and over, matching them up with my maps, attempting to divine the intent and nuance of every word and phrase. It was like being inside a giant standardized test question: If Cheryl climbs north along a ridge for an hour at a rate of 1.5 miles per hour, then west to a saddle from which she can see two oblong lakes to the east, is she standing on the south flank of Peak 7503?

I guessed and guessed again, measuring, reading, pausing, calculating, and counting before ultimately putting my faith in whatever I believed to be true. Fortunately, this stretch of the trail held plenty of clues, riddled with peaks and cliffs, lakes and ponds that were often visible from the trail. I still had the same feeling as I had from the start, when I’d begun walking the Sierra Nevada from its southern beginning — as if I were perched above the whole world, looking down on so much. I pushed from ridge to ridge, feeling relieved when I spotted bare ground in the patches where the sun had melted the snow clean away; quivering with joy when I identified a body of water or a particular rock formation that matched what the map reflected or the guidebook described. In those moments, I felt strong and calm, and then a moment later, when I paused yet again to take stock, I became certain that I’d done a very, very stupid thing in opting to continue on. I passed trees that seemed disconcertingly familiar, as if I’d surely passed them an hour before. I gazed across vast stretches of mountains that struck me as not so different from the vast stretch I’d seen earlier. I scanned the ground for footprints, hoping to be reassured by even the slightest sign of another human being, but saw none. I saw only animal tracks — the soft zigzags of rabbits or the scampering triangles of what I supposed were porcupines or raccoons. The air came alive with the sound of the wind whipping the trees at times and at other times it was profoundly hushed by the endless silencing snow. Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn’t wonder where it was.

“HELLO!” I bellowed periodically, knowing each time that no one would answer, but needing to hear a voice anyway, even if it was only my own. My voice would guard me against it, I believed, it being the possibility that I could be lost in this snowy wilderness forever.

As I hiked, the fragments of songs pushed their way into the mix-tape radio station in my head, interrupted occasionally by Paul’s voice, telling me how foolish I’d been to trek into the snow like this alone. He would be the one who would do whatever had to be done if indeed I didn’t return. In spite of our divorce, he was still my closest kin, or at least the one organized enough to take on such a responsibility. I remembered him lambasting me as we drove from Portland to Minneapolis, when he’d plucked me out of the grips of heroin and Joe the autumn before. “Do you know you could die?” he’d said with disgust, as if he half wished I had so he could prove his point. “Every time you do heroin it’s like you’re playing Russian roulette. You’re putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. You don’t know which time the bullet’s going to be in the chamber.”

I’d had nothing to say in my defense. He was right, though it hadn’t seemed that way at the time.

But walking along a path I carved myself — one I hoped was the PCT — was the opposite of using heroin. The trigger I’d pulled in stepping into the snow made me more alive to my senses than ever. Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Somber and elated, I walked in the cool air, the sun glimmering through the trees, bright against the snow, even though I had my sunglasses on. As omnipresent as the snow was, I also sensed its waning, melting imperceptibly by the minute all around me. It seemed as alive in its dying as a hive of bees was in its life. Sometimes I passed by places where I heard a gurgling, as if a stream ran beneath the snow, impossible to see. Other times it fell in great wet heaps from the branches of the trees.

On my third day out from Sierra City, as I sat hunched near the open door of my tent doctoring my blistered feet, I realized the day before had been the Fourth of July. The fact that I could so clearly imagine what not only my friends but also a good portion of the residents of the United States had done without me made me feel all the more far away. No doubt they’d had parties and parades, acquired sunburns and lit firecrackers, while I was here, alone in the cold. In a flash, I could see myself from far above, a speck on the great mass of green and white, no more or less significant than a single one of the nameless birds in the trees. Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn’t count the days.

The next morning I walked through the snow for hours until I came to a clearing where there was a large fallen tree, its trunk bare of both snow and branches. I took my pack off and climbed up on top of it, its bark rough beneath me. I pulled a few strips of beef jerky out of my pack and sat eating it and swigging my water. Soon I saw a streak of red to my right: a fox walking into the clearing, his paws landing soundlessly on top of the snow. He gazed straight ahead without looking at me, not even seeming to know I was there, though that seemed impossible. When the fox was directly in front of me, perhaps ten feet away, he stopped and turned his head and looked peaceably in my direction, his eyes not exactly going to mine as he sniffed. He looked part feline, part canine, his facial features sharp and compact, his body alert.

My heart raced, but I sat perfectly still, fighting the urge to scramble to my feet and leap behind the tree for protection. I didn’t know what the fox would do next. I didn’t think he would harm me, but I couldn’t help but fear that he would. He was barely knee-high, though his strength was irrefutable, his beauty dazzling, his superiority to me apparent down to his every pristine hair. He could be on me in a flash. This was his world. He was as certain as the sky.

“Fox,” I whispered in the gentlest possible voice I could, as if by naming him I could both defend myself against him and also draw him nearer. He raised his fine-boned red head, but remained standing as he’d been and studied me for several seconds more before turning away without alarm to continue walking across the clearing and into the trees.

“Come back,” I called lightly, and then suddenly shouted, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” I didn’t know the word was going to come out of my mouth until it did.

And then, just as suddenly, I went silent, spent.

The next morning I came to a road. I’d crossed smaller, rougher jeep roads in the previous days that were buried in snow, but none so wide and definitive as this. I almost fell to my knees at the sight of it. The beauty of the snowy mountains was incontestable, but the road was my people. If it was the one I believed it to be, simply arriving there was a victory. It meant I’d followed the path of the PCT. It also meant that there was a town miles away in either direction. I could turn left or right and follow it, and I’d be delivered to a version of early July that made sense to me. I took off my pack and sat down on a grainy mound of snow, pondering what to do. If I was where I thought I was, I’d covered forty-three miles of the PCT in the four days since I’d left Sierra City, though I’d probably hiked more than that, given my shaky abilities with map and compass. Belden Town was another fifty-five mostly snow-covered trail miles away. It was hardly worth thinking about. I had only a few days’ worth of food left in my pack. I’d run out if I tried to push on. I began walking down the road in the direction of a town called Quincy.

The road was like the wilderness I’d been hiking through the last several days, silent and snow-covered, only now I didn’t have to stop every few minutes to figure out where I was going. I only followed it down, as the snow gave way to mud. My guidebook didn’t say how far away Quincy was, only that it was “a long day’s walk.” I quickened my pace, hoping to reach it by evening, though what I was going to do there with only sixty cents was another question.

By eleven I rounded a bend and saw a green SUV parked on the side of the road.

“Hello,” I called, altogether more cautiously than I had in the times I’d bellowed that same word across the white desolation. No one answered. I approached the SUV and looked inside. There was a hooded sweatshirt lying across the front seat and a cardboard coffee cup on the dash, among other thrilling objects reminiscent of my former life. I continued walking down the road for a half hour, until I heard a car approaching behind me and turned.

It was the green SUV. A few moments later, it came to a halt beside me, a man at the wheel and a woman in the passenger seat.

“We’re going to Packer Lake Lodge if you want a ride,” the woman said after she rolled down the window. My heart sank, though I thanked her and got into the back seat. I’d read about Packer Lake Lodge in my guidebook days before. I could have taken a side trail to it a day out of Sierra City, but I’d decided to pass it by when I opted to stay on the PCT. As we drove, I could feel my northward progress reversing itself — all the miles I’d toiled to gain, lost in less than an hour — and yet to be in that car was a kind of heaven. I cleared a patch in the foggy window and watched the trees blaze past. Our top speed was perhaps twenty miles an hour as we crept around bends in the road, but it still felt to me as if we were moving unaccountably fast, the land made general rather than particular, no longer including me but standing quietly off to the side.

I thought about the fox. I wondered if he’d returned to the fallen tree and wondered about me. I remembered the moment after he’d disappeared into the woods and I’d called out for my mother. It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn’t have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me.

10 RANGE OF LIGHT

The mere sight of Packer Lake Lodge felt like a blow. It was a restaurant. With food. And I might as well have been a German shepherd. I could smell it as soon as I got out of the car. I thanked the couple who’d given me a ride and walked toward the little building anyway, leaving Monster on the porch before I went inside. The place was crowded with tourists, most of them people who’d rented one of the rustic cabins that surrounded the restaurant. They didn’t seem to notice the way I stared at their plates as I made my way to the counter, stacks of pancakes skirted by bacon, eggs in exquisitely scrambled heaps, or — most painful of all — cheeseburgers buried by jagged mounds of French fries. I was devastated by the sight of them.

“What have you heard about the snow levels up north of here?” I asked the woman who worked the cash register. I could tell that she was the boss by the way her eyes followed the waitress as she moved about the room with a coffeepot in hand. I’d never met this woman, but I’d worked for her a thousand times. It occurred to me that I could ask her for a job for the summer and quit the PCT.

“It’s socked in pretty much everywhere above here,” she replied. “All the thru-hikers have come down off the trail this year. They’re all walking along the Gold Lake Highway instead.”

“The Gold Lake Highway?” I asked, bewildered. “Was there a man here in the past few days? His name is Greg. He’s fortyish? With brown hair and a beard.”

She shook her head, but the waitress chimed that she’d talked to a PCT hiker who met that description, though she didn’t know his name.

“You can take a seat, if you’d like to eat,” the woman said.

A menu sat on the counter and I picked it up just to see. “Do you have anything that costs sixty cents or less?” I asked her in a jesting tone, so quiet my voice barely rose above the din.

“Seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Free refills,” she replied.

“I’ve got lunch in my pack, actually,” I said, and walked toward the door, past pushed-aside plates that were piled with perfectly edible scraps of food that no one but me and the bears and raccoons would have been willing to eat. I continued out to the porch and sat beside Monster. I pulled my sixty cents from my pocket and stared at the silver coins in my palm as if they would multiply if I stared at them hard enough. I thought of the box waiting for me in Belden Town with the twenty-dollar bill inside. I was starving and it was true I had lunch in my pack, but I was too disheartened to eat it. I paged through my guidebook instead, trying yet again to hatch a new plan.

“I overheard you inside talking about the Pacific Crest Trail,” a woman said. She was middle-aged and slim, her frosted blonde hair cut in a stylish bob. In each ear she wore a single diamond stud.

“I’m hiking it for a few months,” I said.

“I think that’s so neat.” She smiled. “I always wondered about the people who do that. I know the trail is up there,” she said, waving her hand westward, “but I’ve never been on it.” She came closer and for a moment I thought she’d try to give me a hug, but she only patted my arm. “You’re not alone, are you?” When I nodded, she laughed and put a hand to her chest. “And what on earth does your mother have to say about that?”

“She’s dead,” I said, too discouraged and hungry to soften it with a note of apology, the way I usually did.

“My goodness. That’s terrible.” Her sunglasses sat against her chest, dangling from a string of glittery pastel beads. She reached for them and put them on. Her name was Christine, she told me, and she and her husband and their two teenaged daughters were staying in a cabin nearby. “Would you like to come back there with me and take a shower?” she asked.

Christine’s husband, Jeff, made me a sandwich while I showered. When I emerged from the bathroom, it was sitting on a plate, sliced diagonally and rimmed by blue corn tortilla chips and a pickle.

“If you’d like to add more meat to it, feel free,” Jeff said, pushing a platter of cold cuts toward me from his seat across the table. He was handsome and chubby, his dark hair wavy and gray at the temples. An attorney, Christine had told me during the short walk from the restaurant to their cabin. They lived in San Francisco, but they spent the first week of July here each year.

“Maybe just a few more slices, thanks,” I said, reaching for the turkey with fake nonchalance.

“It’s organic, in case that matters to you,” said Christine. “And humanely raised. We’ve gone in that direction as much as we possibly can. You forgot the cheese,” she scolded Jeff, and went to the refrigerator to retrieve it. “Would you like some dill Havarti on your sandwich, Cheryl?”

“I’m fine. Thanks,” I said to be polite, but she sliced some anyway and brought it to me, and I ate it so fast she went back to the counter and sliced more without saying anything about it. She reached into the chip bag and put another handful on my plate, then cracked open a can of root beer and set it before me. If she’d emptied the contents of the entire refrigerator, I’d have eaten every last thing. “Thank you,” I said every time she placed another item on the table.

Beyond the kitchen, I could see Jeff and Christine’s two daughters through the sliding-glass door. They were sitting on the deck in twin Adirondack chairs, browsing copies of Seventeen and People with their headphones in their ears.

“How old are they?” I asked, nodding in their direction.

“Sixteen and almost eighteen,” said Christine. “They’re going into their sophomore and senior years.”

They sensed us looking at them and glanced up. I waved, and they waved shyly back at me before returning to their magazines.

“I’d love it if they did something like you’re doing. If they could be as brave and strong as you,” said Christine. “But maybe not that brave, actually. I think it would scare me to have one of them out there like you are. Aren’t you scared, all by yourself?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But not as much as you’d think.” My wet hair dripped onto my dirty shirt at the shoulders. I was conscious that my clothes stank, though beneath them I felt cleaner than I’d ever been. The shower had been an almost holy experience after days of sweating in the cold beneath my clothes, the hot water and soap scorching me clean. I noticed a few books scattered on the far end of the table — Norman Rush’s Mating, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, and The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. They were books I’d read and loved, their covers like familiar faces to me, the mere sight of them making me feel as if I was somewhere like home. Perhaps Jeff and Christine would let me stay here with them, I thought nonsensically. I could be like one of their daughters, reading magazines while getting a tan on the deck. If they’d offered, I’d have said yes.

“Do you like to read?” Christine asked. “That’s what we do when we come up here. That’s our idea of relaxation.”

“Reading’s my reward at the end of the day,” I said. “The book I have right now is Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories.” I still had the entire book in my pack. I’d not burned it page by page as I went along, mindful that with the snow and the changes in my itinerary I didn’t know how long it’d be before I reached my next resupply box. I’d already read the whole thing and started back in on page one the night before.

“Well, you’re welcome to one of these,” said Jeff, rising to take Mating in his hand. “We’re done with them. Or if that’s not your taste, you could probably take this one,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom off the kitchen. He returned a moment later with a fat paperback by James Michener that he set near my now-empty plate.

I looked at the book. It was called The Novel, which I’d never heard of or read, though James Michener had been my mother’s favorite author. It wasn’t until I’d gone off to college that I learned there was anything wrong with that. An entertainer for the masses, one of my professors had scoffed after inquiring what books I’d read. Michener, he advised me, was not the kind of writer I should bother with if I truly wanted to be a writer myself. I felt like a fool. All those years as a teen, I’d thought myself sophisticated when I’d been absorbed in Poland and The Drifters, Space and Sayonara. In my first month at college, I quickly learned that I knew nothing about who was important and who was not.

“You know that isn’t a real book,” I’d said disdainfully to my mother when someone had given her Michener’s Texas as a Christmas gift later that year.

“Real?” My mother looked at me, quizzical and amused.

“I mean serious. Like actual literature worth your time,” I replied.

“Well, my time has never been worth all that much, you might like to know, since I’ve never made more than minimum wage and more often than not, I’ve slaved away for free.” She laughed lightly and swatted my arm with her hand, slipping effortlessly away from my judgment, the way she always did.

When my mother died and the woman Eddie eventually married moved in, I took all the books I wanted from my mother’s shelf. I took the ones she’d bought in the early 1980s, when we’d first moved onto our land: The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and Double Yoga. Northland Wildflowers and Quilts to Wear. Songs for the Dulcimer and Bread Baking Basics. Using Plants for Healing and I Always Look Up the Word Egregious. I took the books she’d read to me, chapter by chapter, before I could read to myself: the unabridged Bambi and Black Beauty and Little House in the Big Woods. I took the books that she’d acquired as a college student in the years right before she died: Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I did not take the books by James Michener, the ones my mother loved the most.

“Thank you,” I said now to Jeff, holding The Novel. “I’ll trade this for the Flannery O’Connor if you’d like. It’s an incredible book.” I stopped short of mentioning that I’d have to burn it that night in the woods if he said no.

“Absolutely,” he replied, laughing. “But I think I’m getting the better deal.”

After lunch, Christine drove me to the ranger station in Quincy, but when we got there, the ranger I spoke to seemed only dimly aware of the PCT. He hadn’t been on it this year, he told me, because it was still covered with snow. He was surprised to learn I had. I returned to Christine’s car and studied my guidebook to get my bearings. The only reasonable place to get back on the PCT was where it crossed a road fourteen miles west of where we were.

“Those girls look like they might know something,” said Christine. She pointed across the parking lot to a gas station, where two young women stood next to a van with the name of a camp painted on its side.

I introduced myself to them, and a few minutes later I was hugging Christine goodbye and clambering into the back of their van. The women were college students who worked at a summer camp; they were going right past the place where the PCT crossed the road. They said they’d be happy to give me a ride, so long as I was willing to wait while they did their errands. I sat in the shade of their lumbering camp van, reading The Novel in the parking lot of a grocery store as they shopped. It was hot and humid — summertime in a way that it hadn’t been up in the snow just that morning. As I read, I could feel my mother’s presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to focus on the words. Why had I mocked her for loving Michener? The fact is, I’d loved Michener too — when I was fifteen I’d read The Drifters four times. One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret. Small things that stung now: all the times I’d scorned her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her touch; the time I’d said, “Aren’t you amazed to see how much more sophisticated I am at twenty-one than you were?” The thought of my youthful lack of humility made me nauseous now. I had been an arrogant asshole and, in the midst of that, my mother died. Yes, I’d been a loving daughter and yes, I’d been there for her when it mattered, but I could have been better. I could have been what I’d begged her to say I was: the best daughter in the world.

I shut The Novel and sat almost paralyzed with regret until the women reappeared, rolling a cart. Together we loaded their bags into the van. The women were four or five years younger than me, their hair and faces shiny and clean. Both wore sporty shorts and tank tops and colorful strands of braided yarn around their ankles and wrists.

“So we were talking. It’s pretty intense you’re hiking alone,” said one of them after we’d finished with the bags.

“What do your parents think of you doing it?” asked the other.

“They don’t. I mean — I don’t have parents. My mom’s dead and I don’t have a father — or I do, technically, but he’s not in my life.” I climbed into the van and tucked The Novel into Monster so I wouldn’t have to see the discomfort sweep across their sunny faces.

“Wow,” said one of them.

“Yeah,” said the other.

“The upside is that I’m free. I get to do whatever I want to do.”

“Yeah,” said the one who’d said wow.

“Wow,” said the one who’d said yeah.

They got into the front and we drove. I looked out the window, at the towering trees whipping past, thinking of Eddie. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t mentioned him when the women asked about my parents. He’d become like someone I used to know. I loved him still and I’d loved him instantly, from the very first night that I met him when I was ten. He wasn’t like any of the men my mother dated in the years after she divorced my father. Most of those men had lasted only a few weeks, each scared off, I quickly understood, by the fact that allying himself with my mother meant also allying himself with me, Karen, and Leif. But Eddie loved all four of us from the start. He worked at an auto parts factory at the time, though he was a carpenter by trade. He had soft blue eyes and a sharp German nose and brown hair that he kept in a ponytail that draped halfway down his back.

The first night I met him, he came for dinner at Tree Loft, the apartment complex where we lived. It was the third such apartment complex we’d lived in since my parents’ divorce. All of the apartment buildings were located within a half-mile radius of one another in Chaska, a town about an hour outside of Minneapolis. We moved whenever my mom could find a cheaper place. When Eddie arrived, my mother was still making dinner, so he played with Karen, Leif, and me out on the little patch of grass in front of our building. He chased us and caught us and held us upside down and shook us to see if any coins would fall from our pockets; if they did, he would take them from the grass and run, and we would run after him, shrieking with a particular joy that had been denied us all of our lives because we’d never been loved right by a man. He tickled us and watched as we performed dance routines and cartwheels. He taught us whimsical songs and complicated hand jives. He stole our noses and ears and then showed them to us with his thumb tucked between his fingers, eventually giving them back while we laughed. By the time my mother called us in to dinner, I was so besotted with him that I’d lost my appetite.

We didn’t have a dining room in our apartment. There were two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a living room with a little alcove in one corner where there was a countertop, a stove, a refrigerator, and some cabinets. In the center of the room was a big round wooden table whose legs had been cut off so it was only knee-high. My mother had purchased it for ten dollars from the people who’d lived in our apartment before us. We sat on the floor around this table to eat. We said we were Chinese, unaware that it was actually the Japanese who ate meals seated on the floor before low tables. We weren’t allowed to have pets at Tree Loft, but we did anyway, a dog named Kizzy and a canary named Canary, who flew free throughout the apartment.

He was a mannerly bird. He shat on a square of newspaper in a cat-litter pan in the corner. Whether he’d been trained to do it by my mother or did it of his own volition, I don’t know. A few minutes after we all sat down on the floor around the table, Canary landed on Eddie’s head. Usually when he landed on us, he’d perch there for only a moment and then fly away, but on top of Eddie’s head, Canary stayed. We giggled. He turned to us and asked, with false obliviousness, what we were laughing at.

“There’s a canary on your head,” we told him.

“What?” he said, looking around the room in pretend surprise.

“There’s a canary on your head,” we yelled.

“Where?” he asked.

“There’s a canary on your head!” we yelled, now in delighted hysterics.

There was a canary on his head and, miraculously, the canary stayed there, all through dinner, all through afterwards, falling asleep, nestling in.

So did Eddie.

At least he did until my mother died. Her illness had initially brought the two of us closer than we’d ever been. We’d become comrades in the weeks that she was sick — playing tag team at the hospital, consulting each other about medical decisions, weeping together when we knew the end was near, meeting with the funeral home director together after she died. But soon after that, Eddie pulled away from my siblings and me. He acted like he was our friend instead of our father. Quickly, he fell in love with another woman and soon she moved into our house with her children. By the time the first anniversary of my mother’s death rolled around, Karen, Leif, and I were essentially on our own; most of my mother’s things were in boxes I’d packed up and stored. He loved us, Eddie said, but life moved on. He was still our father, he claimed, but he did nothing to demonstrate that. I railed against it, but eventually had no choice but to accept what my family had become: not a family at all.

You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, my mother had often said.

By the time the young women pulled their van over to the side of the narrow highway, the tall trees that lined the road almost entirely blotted out the setting sun. I thanked them for the ride and looked around as they drove away. I was standing next to a forest service sign that said WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND. The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their van. I hadn’t bothered to look at my map as we drove. After days of constant vigilance, I was tired of checking the guidebook and checking again. I’d simply enjoyed the ride, lulled by the women’s confidence that they knew where they were going. From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that would take me up to the PCT. I read the fresh pages that I’d ripped from my guidebook as I walked the paved loops of the campground, straining to see the words in the dying light. My heart leapt with relief when I came across the words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was nearly two miles away from the PCT. The words “just beyond it” had meant something different to the women in the van than they did to me.

I looked around at the water spigots, the sets of brown outhouses, and the big sign that explained how one should go about paying for a spot for the night by leaving money in an envelope that should then be deposited through a slot in a wooden box. Aside from a few RVs and a smattering of tents, the campground was eerily empty. I walked another paved loop, wondering what to do. I didn’t have money to pay to camp, but it was too dark to walk into the woods. I came to a campsite on the very edge of the campground, the one that was farthest away from the sign detailing how to pay. Who would even see me?

I set up my tent and cooked and ate my dinner in luxury on the picnic table with only my headlamp to light my way and peed in perfect comfort in the pit toilet, and then got into my tent and opened up The Novel. I’d read perhaps three pages when my tent was flooded with light. I unzipped my door and stepped out to greet the elderly couple who stood in the blinding headlights of a pickup truck.

“Hi,” I said tentatively.

“You need to pay for this spot,” the woman barked in response.

“I need to pay?” I said, with false innocence and surprise. “I thought only people who had cars had to pay the fee. I’m on foot. I just have my backpack.” The couple listened in silence, their wrinkled faces indignant. “I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning. By six at the latest.”

“If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay,” the woman repeated.

“It’s twelve dollars for the night,” the man added in a gasping voice.

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t happen to have any cash on me. I’m on this big trip. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail — the PCT? — and there’s all this snow up in the mountains — it’s a record year — and anyway, I got off the trail and I didn’t plan to be here because these women who gave me a ride accidentally dropped me off in the wrong place and it was—”

“None of that changes the fact you have to pay, young lady,” the man bellowed with surprising power, his voice silencing me like a great horn from the fog.

“If you can’t pay, you’ve got to pack up and leave,” said the woman. She wore a sweatshirt that had a pair of baby raccoons peeping coyly from a burrow in a tree on her chest.

“There’s no one even here! It’s the middle of the night! What harm would it do if I simply—”

“Them are the rules,” heaved the man. He turned away and got back into the truck, done with me.

“We’re sorry, miss, but we’re the camp hosts and keeping everyone to the rules is what we’re here to do,” said the woman. Her face softened for a moment in apology before she pursed her lips and added, “We’d hate to have to call the police.”

I lowered my eyes and addressed her raccoons. “I just — I can’t believe that I’m doing any harm. I mean, no one would even be using this site if I weren’t here,” I said quietly, trying to make one last appeal, woman to woman.

“We’re not saying you have to leave,” she shouted, as if she were scolding a dog to hush up. “We’re saying you’ve got to pay.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“There’s a trail to the PCT that starts up just past the bathrooms,” the woman said, gesturing behind her. “Or you can walk on the side of the road, about a mile or so up. I think the road’s more direct than the trail. We’ll keep the lights on while you pack,” she said, and got back into the truck beside her husband, their faces now invisible to me behind the headlights.

I turned to my tent, stunned. I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands, and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by now, the half moon in the sky. The only thing scarier than the thought of hiking along an unknown trail in the dark was walking along an unknown road in the dark. I put on Monster and waved to the couple in the truck, unable to see whether they waved back.

I walked with my headlamp in my hand. It barely lit the way for each step; the batteries were dying. I followed the pavement to the bathrooms and saw the trail the woman had mentioned leading off behind it. I took a few tentative steps onto it. I’d become used to feeling safe in the woods, safe even through all the nights, but walking in the woods in the dark felt like a different matter altogether because I couldn’t see. I could run into nocturnal animals or trip over a root. I could miss a turn and continue on where I didn’t plan to go. I walked slowly, nervously, as I had the very first day of my hike, when I’d been braced for a rattlesnake to lunge at me any second.

After a while, the outlines of the landscape revealed themselves dimly to me. I was in a forest of tall pines and spruces, their limbless straight trunks culminating in clusters of dense branches high above me. I could hear a stream gurgling off to my left and feel the soft blanket of dry pine needles crackling beneath my boots. I walked with a kind of concentration I’d never had before, and because of it I could feel the trail and my body more acutely, as if I were walking barefoot and naked. It reminded me of being a child and learning how to ride a horse. My mother had taught me on her horse, Lady, letting me sit in the saddle while she stood holding a lead rope attached to Lady’s bridle. I clutched Lady’s mane with my hands at first, scared even when she walked, but eventually I relaxed and my mother implored me to close my eyes so I could feel the way the horse moved beneath me and the way my body moved with the horse. Later, I did the same thing with my arms held out wide on either side, going round and round, my body surrendering to Lady’s as we moved.

I made my way along the trail for twenty minutes until I came to a place where the trees opened up. I took off my pack and got down on my hands and knees with my headlamp to explore a spot that seemed like a reasonable place to sleep. I set up my tent, crawled inside, and zipped myself into my sleeping bag, though now I wasn’t even remotely tired, energized by the eviction and the late-night hike.

I opened up The Novel, but my headlamp was flickering and dying, so I turned it off and lay in the dark. I smoothed my hands over my arms, hugging myself. I could feel my tattoo beneath my right fingers; could still trace the horse’s outline. The woman who’d inked it had told me that it would stand up on my flesh for a few weeks, but it had remained that way even after a few months, as if the horse were embossed rather than inked into my skin. It wasn’t just a horse, that tattoo. It was Lady — the horse my mother had asked the doctor at the Mayo Clinic if she could ride when he’d told her she was going to die. Lady wasn’t her real name — it was only what we called her. She was a registered American Saddlebred, her official name spelled out in grandiose glory on the breeder’s association certificate that came with her: Stonewall’s Highland Nancy, sired by Stonewall Sensation and foaled by Mack’s Golden Queen. My mother had managed, against all reason, to buy Lady in the horrible winter when she and my father were finally and forever breaking up. My mother had met a couple at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. They wanted to sell their purebred twelve-year-old mare for cheap, and even though my mother couldn’t afford even cheap, she went to see the horse and struck a deal with the couple to pay them three hundred dollars over the course of six months, and then she struck another deal with another couple who owned a stable nearby, doing work in exchange for Lady’s board.

“She’s breathtaking,” my mother said each time she described Lady, and she was. Over sixteen hands tall, lean and long-limbed, high-stepping and elegant as a queen. She had a white star on her forehead, but the rest of her coat was the same red chestnut as the fox I’d seen in the snow.

I was six when my mother bought her. We were living on the basement level of an apartment complex called Barbary Knoll. My mother had just left my father for the last time. We barely had enough money to live, but my mother had to have that horse. I knew instinctively, even as a child, that it was Lady who saved my mother’s life. Lady who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother’s religion. It was with them she’d wanted to be on all those Sundays as a child, when she’d been made to put on dresses to go to mass. The stories she told me about horses were a counterpoint to the other stories she’d told me about her Catholic upbringing. She did anything she could to ride them. She raked stalls and polished tack, hauled hay and spread straw, any kind of odd job that came her way, so that she would be allowed to hang out at whatever stable happened to be nearest and ride someone’s horse.

Images of her past cowgirl life came to me from time to time, captured in freeze-frame moments, as clear and concise to me as if I’d read them in a book. The overnight backcountry rides she’d done in New Mexico with her father. The daredevil rodeo tricks she’d practiced and performed with her girlfriends. At sixteen she got her own horse, a palomino named Pal, whom she rode in horse shows and rodeos in Colorado. She still had the ribbons when she died. I packed them in a box that was now in Lisa’s basement in Portland. A yellow third for barrel racing, a pink fifth for walk, trot, canter; green for showmanship and participation; and a single blue ribbon for riding her horse through all of the gaits smoothly over a course lined with mud pits and tight corners, laughing clowns and blaring horns, while she balanced an egg on a silver spoon in her outstretched hand for longer than anyone else could or did.

In the stable where Lady first lived when she became ours, my mother did the same work she’d done as a kid, cleaning stalls and spreading hay, hauling things to and fro in a wheelbarrow. Often, she brought Karen, Leif, and me with her. We played in the barn while she did her chores. Afterwards, we watched her ride Lady around and around the ring, each of us getting a turn when she was done. By the time we moved to our land in northern Minnesota, we had a second horse, a mixed-breed gelding named Roger, whom my mother had bought because I’d fallen in love with him and his owner was willing to let him go for next to nothing. We hauled them both up north in a borrowed trailer. Their pasture was a quarter of our forty acres.

When I went home one day to visit Eddie in early December nearly three years after my mother died, I was shocked by how thin and weak Lady had become. She was nearly thirty-one, old for a horse, and even if nursing her back to health had been possible, no one was around enough to do it. Eddie and his girlfriend had begun splitting their time between the house where I’d grown up and a trailer in a small town outside the Twin Cities. The two dogs, two cats, and four hens we’d had when my mother died had either died themselves or been given away to new homes. Only our two horses, Roger and Lady, remained. Often, they were cared for in the most cursory way by a neighbor whom Eddie had enlisted to feed them.

When I visited that early December, I talked to Eddie about Lady’s condition. He was belligerent at first, telling me that he didn’t know why the horses were his problem. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him about why, as my mother’s widower, he was responsible for her horses. I spoke only about Lady, persistent about making a plan, and after a while he softened his tone and we agreed that Lady should be put down. She was old and sickly; she’d lost an alarming amount of weight; the light in her eyes had faded. I’d consulted with the veterinarian already, I told him. The vet could come to our place and euthanize Lady with an injection. That, or we could shoot her ourselves.

Eddie thought we should do the latter. We were both flat broke. It was how horses had been put down for generations. It seemed to both of us a strangely more humane thing to do — that she’d die at the hands of someone she knew and trusted, rather than a stranger. Eddie said he’d do it before Paul and I returned for Christmas in a few weeks. We wouldn’t be coming for a family occasion: Paul and I would be in the house alone. Eddie planned to spend Christmas at his girlfriend’s place with her and her kids. Karen and Leif had plans of their own too — Leif would be in St. Paul with his girlfriend and her family, and Karen with the husband she’d met and married within the span of a few weeks earlier that year.

I felt ill as Paul and I pulled into the driveway a few weeks later, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Over and over again, I’d been imagining how it would feel to look out to the pasture and see only Roger. But when I got out of the car, Lady was still there, shivering in her stall, her flesh hanging from her skeletal frame. It hurt to even look at her. The weather had turned brutally cold, breaking records with lows that hovered around 25 degrees below zero, with the wind chill plunging the temperature colder still.

I didn’t call Eddie to ask why he hadn’t followed through on what we’d decided. I called my mother’s father in Alabama instead. He’d been a horseman all his life. We talked for an hour about Lady. He asked me one question after another, and by the end of our conversation he was adamant that it was time to put her down. I told him I’d sleep on it. The next morning the phone rang shortly after dawn.

It wasn’t my grandfather calling to wish me a merry Christmas. It was my grandfather calling to implore me to act now. To let Lady die naturally was cruel and inhumane, he insisted, and I knew he was right. I also knew that it was up to me to make sure it was done. I didn’t have money to pay for the veterinarian to come out and give her an injection, and even if I did, it was Christmas and I doubted he would come. My grandfather described to me in specific detail how to shoot a horse. When I expressed trepidation, he assured me this was the way it had been done for years. I also worried about what to do with Lady’s corpse. The ground was so deeply frozen that burial was impossible.

“Leave her,” he instructed. “The coyotes will drag her away.”

“What should I do?” I cried to Paul after I hung up the phone. We didn’t know it, but it was our last Christmas together. A couple of months later, I’d tell him about my infidelities and he’d move out. By the time Christmas came again we were discussing divorce.

“Do what you think is right,” he said on that Christmas morning. We were sitting at the kitchen table — its every crack and groove familiar to me, and yet it seemed as if I were as far as I could be from home, alone on an ice floe.

“I don’t know what’s right,” I said, though I did. I knew exactly what I had to do. It was what I’d had to do so many times now: choose the best of two horrible things. But I couldn’t do it without my brother. Paul and I had shot a gun before — Leif had taught us both the previous winter — but neither of us could do it with any confidence. Leif wasn’t an avid hunter, but at least he’d done it often enough that he knew what he was doing. When I called him, he agreed to drive home that evening.

In the morning, we discussed in detail what we’d do. I told him everything our grandfather had told me.

“Okay,” he said. “Get her ready.”

Outside, the sun was bright, the sky crystal blue. By eleven it had warmed to 17 degrees below zero. We bundled ourselves in layers of clothes. It was so cold the trees were cracking open, freezing and exploding in great bursts that I’d heard from my bed the sleepless night before.

I whispered to Lady as I put her halter on, telling her how much I loved her as I led her out of her stall. Paul shut the gate behind us, trapping Roger inside so he couldn’t follow. I led her across the icy snow, turning back to watch her walk one last time. She still moved with an unspeakable grace and power, striding with the long, grand high-stepping gait that always took my mother’s breath away. I led her to a birch tree that Paul and I had chosen the previous afternoon and tied her to it by her lead rope. The tree was on the very edge of the pasture, beyond which the woods thickened in earnest, far enough away from the house that I hoped the coyotes would approach and take her body that night. I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat, murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding.

When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle.

Paul took my arm and together we stumbled through the snow to stand behind Leif. We were only six feet away from Lady. Her warm breath was like a silk cloud. The frozen crust of the snow held us for a moment, then collapsed so we all sank up to our knees.

“Right between her eyes,” I said to Leif, repeating yet again the words our grandfather had said to me. If we did that, he promised, we’d kill her in one clean shot.

Leif crouched, kneeling on one knee. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun. The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression.

“Shoot her again,” I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she didn’t fall and she didn’t run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we’d done, her face a constellation of bloodless holes. In an instant I knew we’d done the wrong thing, not in killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come out. I’d had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no such thing as one clean shot.

“Shoot her! Shoot her!” I pleaded in a guttural wail I didn’t know was mine.

“I’m out of bullets,” Leif yelled.

“Lady!” I shrieked. Paul grabbed my shoulders to pull me toward him and I batted him away, panting and whimpering as if someone were beating me to death.

Lady took one wobbling step and then fell onto her front knees, her body tilting hideously forward as if she were a great ship slowly sinking into the sea. Her head swayed and she let out a deep moan. Blood gushed from her soft nostrils in a sudden, great torrent, hitting the snow so hot it hissed. She coughed and coughed, tremendous buckets of blood coming each time, her back legs buckling in excruciating slow motion beneath her. She hovered there, struggling to stay grotesquely up, before she finally toppled over onto her side, where she kicked her legs and flailed and twisted her neck and fought to rise again.

“Lady!” I howled. “Lady!”

Leif grabbed me. “Look away!” he shouted, and together we turned away.

“LOOK AWAY!” he hollered to Paul, and Paul obeyed.

“Please come take her,” Leif chanted, as tears streaked down his face. “Come take her. Come take her. Come take her.”

When I turned, Lady had dropped her head to the ground at last, though her sides still heaved and her legs twitched. The three of us staggered closer, breaking through the snow’s crust to sink miserably to our knees again. We watched as she breathed enormous slow breaths and then finally she sighed and her body went still.

Our mother’s horse. Lady. Stonewall’s Highland Nancy was dead.

Whether it had taken five minutes or an hour, I didn’t know. My mittens and hat had fallen off, but I could not bring myself to retrieve them. My eyelashes had frozen into clumps. Strands of hair that had blown onto my tear- and snot-drenched face had frozen into icicles that clinked when I moved. I pushed them numbly away, unable even to register the cold. I knelt beside Lady’s belly and ran my hands along her blood-speckled body one last time. She was still warm, just as my mother had been when I’d come into the room at the hospital and seen that she’d died without me. I looked at Leif and wondered if he was remembering the same thing. I crawled to her head and touched her cold ears, soft as velvet. I put my hands over the black bullet holes in her white star. The deep tunnels of blood that had burned through the snow around her were already beginning to freeze.

Paul and I watched as Leif took out his knife and cut bundles of reddish-blonde hair from Lady’s mane and tail. He handed one to me.

“Mom can go to the other side now,” he said, looking into my eyes as if it were only the two of us in the entire world. “That’s what the Indians believe — that when a great warrior dies you’ve got to kill their horse so he can cross over to the other side of the river. It’s a way of showing respect. Maybe Mom can ride away now.”

I imagined our mother crossing a great river on Lady’s strong back, finally leaving us nearly three years after she died. I wanted it to be true. It was the thing I wished for when I had a wish to make. Not that my mother would ride back to me — though, of course, I wanted that — but that she and Lady would ride away together. That the worst thing I’d ever done had been a healing instead of a massacre.

I slept finally that night in the woods somewhere outside the Whitehorse Campground. And when I did, I dreamed of snow. Not the snow in which my brother and I had killed Lady, but the snow I’d just passed through up in the mountains, the memory of it more frightening than the experience of it had been. All night long, I dreamed of the things that could have happened but didn’t. Skidding and sliding down a treacherous slope and off the side of a cliff or crashing into rocks below. Walking and never coming to that road, but wandering lost and starving instead.

I studied my guidebook as I ate my breakfast the next morning. If I walked up to the PCT as planned, I’d be walking into more snow. The idea of that spooked me, and as I gazed at my map I saw that I didn’t have to do it. I could walk back to the Whitehorse Campground and west farther still to Bucks Lake. From there I could follow a jeep road that wended its way north, ascending to the PCT at a place called Three Lakes. The alternate route was about the same distance as the PCT, approximately fifteen miles, but it was at a low enough elevation that it had a chance of being snow-free. I packed up my camp, walked back down the trail I’d come on the night before, and strode defiantly through the Whitehorse Campground.

All morning, as I walked west to Bucks Lake, then north and west again along its shore before coming to the rugged jeep road that would take me back up to the PCT, I thought of the resupply box that waited for me in Belden Town. Not so much the box, but the twenty-dollar bill that would be inside. And not so much the twenty-dollar bill, but the food and beverages I could buy with it. I spent hours in a half-ecstatic, half-tortured reverie, fantasizing about cake and cheeseburgers, chocolate and bananas, apples and mixed-green salads, and, more than anything, about Snapple lemonade. This did not make sense. I’d had only a few Snapple lemonades in my pre-PCT life and liked them well enough, but they hadn’t stood out in any particular way. It had not been my drink. But now it haunted me. Pink or yellow, it didn’t matter. Not a day passed that I didn’t imagine in vivid detail what it would be like to hold one in my hand and bring it to my mouth. Some days I forbade myself to think about it, lest I go entirely insane.

I could see that the road to Three Lakes had only recently become free of snow. Great gashes had split open in places across it and streams of melting snow flowed in wide gaping gullies along its sides. I followed it up beneath a dense canopy of trees without seeing anyone. Midafternoon, I felt a familiar tug inside me. I was getting my period, I realized. My first on the trail. I’d almost forgotten it could come. The new way I’d been aware of my body since beginning my hike had blunted the old ways. No longer was I concerned about the delicate intricacies of whether I felt infinitesimally fatter or thinner than I had the day before. There was no such thing as a bad hair day. The smallest inner reverberations were obliterated by the frank pain I always felt in the form of my aching feet or the muscles of my shoulders and upper back that knotted and burned so hard and hot that I had to pause several times an hour to do a series of moves that would offer a moment of relief. I took off my pack, dug through my first aid kit, and found the jagged hunk of natural sponge I’d put in a small ziplock bag before my trip began. I’d used it only a few times experimentally before I took it on the PCT. Back in Minneapolis, the sponge had seemed like a sensible way to deal with my period given my circumstances on the trail, but now that I held it, I was less than sure. I attempted to wash my hands with water from my bottle, dousing the sponge as I did so, and then squeezed it out, pulled down my shorts, squatted on the road, and pushed the sponge into my vagina as far as I could, wedging it against my cervix.

As I pulled up my shorts, I heard the sound of an engine approaching, and a moment later a red pickup truck with an extended cab and oversized tires rounded a bend. The driver hit the brakes when he saw me, startled at the sight. I was startled too, and deeply grateful that I wasn’t still squatting and half naked with my hand jammed into my crotch. I waved nervously as the truck pulled up beside me.

“Howdy,” a man said, and reached through his open window. I took his hand and shook it, conscious of where mine had just been. There were two other men in the truck with him — one in the front and another in the back seat with two boys. The men looked to be in their thirties, the boys about eight.

“You headed up to Three Lakes?” the man asked.

“Yeah.”

He was handsome and clean-cut and white, like the man beside him and the boys in the back. The other man was Latino and long-haired, a hard round belly rising before him.

“We’re headed up there to do some fishing. We’d give you a ride, but we’re packed,” he said, pointing to the back of the truck, which was covered by a camper.

“That’s okay. I like to walk.”

“Well, we’re having Hawaiian screwdrivers tonight, so stop on by.”

“Thanks,” I said, and watched them drive off.

I hiked the rest of the afternoon thinking about Hawaiian screwdrivers. I didn’t know exactly what they were but they didn’t sound all that different from Snapple lemonade to me. When I reached the top of the road, the red pickup and the men’s camp came into view, perched above the westernmost of the Three Lakes. The PCT was just beyond it. I followed a scant trail east along the lake’s shore, finding a secluded spot among the boulders that were scattered around the lake. I set up my tent and ducked into the woods to squeeze out my sponge and put it in again. I walked down to the lake to filter water and wash my hands and face. I thought about diving in to bathe, but the water was ice-cold and I was already chilled in the mountain air. Before coming on the PCT, I’d imagined countless baths in lakes and rivers and streams, but in reality, only rarely did I plunge in. By the end of the day, I often ached with fatigue and shook with what felt like a fever but was only exhaustion and the chill of my drying sweat. The best I could do most days was splash my face and strip off my sweat-drenched T-shirt and shorts before swaddling myself in my fleece anorak and leggings for the night.

I removed my boots and pulled the duct tape and 2nd Skin off my feet and soaked them in the icy water. When I rubbed them, another blackened toenail came off in my hand, the second I’d lost so far. The lake was calm and clear, rimmed by towering trees and leafy bushes among the boulders. I saw a bright green lizard in the mud; it froze in place for a moment before scampering away at lightning speed. The men’s camp was not far beyond me along the lakeshore, but they hadn’t yet detected my presence. Before going to see them, I brushed my teeth, put on lip balm, and pulled a comb through my hair.

“There she is,” shouted the man who’d been in the passenger seat when I ambled up. “And just in time too.”

He handed me a red plastic cup full of a yellow liquid that I could only assume was a Hawaiian screwdriver. It had ice cubes. It had vodka. It had pineapple juice. When I sipped it I thought I would faint. Not from the alcohol hitting me, but from the sheer fabulousness of the combination of liquid sugar and booze.

The two white men were firefighters. The Latino man was a painter by passion but a carpenter by trade. His name was Francisco, though everyone called him Paco. He was the cousin of one of the white guys, visiting from Mexico City, though the three of them had grown up together on the same block in Sacramento, where the firefighters still lived. Paco had gone to visit his great-grandmother in Mexico ten years before, fallen in love with a Mexican woman while there, and stayed. The firefighters’ sons flitted past us, playing war while we sat around a fire ring filled with logs the men had yet to light, making intermittent shouts, gasps, and explosive sounds as they shot each other with plastic guns from behind the boulders.

“You’ve got to be kidding me! You’ve got to be kidding me!” the firefighters took turns exclaiming when I explained to them what I was doing and showed them my battered feet with their eight remaining toenails. They asked me question after question while marveling and shaking their heads and plying me with another Hawaiian screwdriver and tortilla chips.

“Women are the ones with the cojones,” said Paco as he made a bowl of guacamole. “We guys like to think we’re the ones, but we’re wrong.” His hair was like a snake down his back, a long thick ponytail bound in sections all the way down with plain rubber bands. After the fire was lit and after we had eaten the trout that one of them had caught in the lake and the stew made with venison from a deer one of them had shot last winter, it was only me and Paco sitting by the fire as the other men read to their sons in the tent.

“You want to smoke a joint with me?” he asked as he took one from his shirt pocket. He lit it up, took a hit, and handed it to me. “So this is the Sierras, eh?” he said, looking out over the dark lake. “All that time growing up I never made it up here before.”

“It’s the Range of Light,” I said, passing the joint back to him. “That’s what John Muir called it. I can see why. I’ve never seen light like I have out here. All the sunsets and sunrises against the mountains.”

“You’re on a spirit walk, aren’t you?” Paco said, staring into the fire.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could call it that.”

“That’s what it is,” he said, looking at me intensely. He stood. “I’ve got something I want to give you.” He went to the back of the truck and returned with a T-shirt. He handed it to me and I held it up. On the front was a giant picture of Bob Marley, his dreadlocks surrounded by images of electric guitars and pre-Columbian effigies in profile. On the back was a picture of Haile Selassie, the man Rastafarians thought was God incarnate, rimmed by a red and green and gold swirl. “That is a sacred shirt,” Paco said as I studied it by the firelight. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.”

I nodded, silenced by emotion and the half-drunk and entirely stoned certitude that the shirt really was sacred. “Thank you,” I said.

When I walked back to my camp, I stood gazing up at the stars with the shirt in my hand before crawling into my tent. Away from Paco, sobered by the cool air, I wondered about walking with the spirits. What did that even mean? Did I walk with the spirits? Did my mom? Where had she gone after she died? Where was Lady? Had they really ridden together across the river to the other side? Reason told me that all they’d done was die, though they’d both come to me repeatedly in my dreams. The Lady dreams were the opposite of those I’d had about my mother — the ones in which she’d ordered me to kill her over and over again. In the dreams of Lady, I didn’t have to kill anyone. I had only to accept a giant and fantastically colorful bouquet of flowers that she carried to me clenched in her soft mouth. She would nudge me with her nose until I took it, and in that offering, I knew that I was forgiven. But was I? Was that her spirit or was it only my subconscious working it out?

I wore the shirt from Paco the next morning as I hiked back to the PCT and on to Belden Town, catching glimpses of Lassen Peak as I went. It was about fifty miles to the north, a snowy volcanic mountain rising to 10,457 feet — a landmark to me not only because of its size and majesty, but because it was the first of the peaks I’d pass in the Cascade Range, which I’d enter just north of Belden Town. From Lassen northward, the mountains of the High Cascades lined up in a rough row among hundreds of other, less prominent mountains, each one marking the progress of my journey in the coming weeks. Each of those peaks seemed in my mind’s eye to be like a set of monkey bars I’d swung on as a child. Every time I got to one, the next would be just out of reach. From Lassen Peak to Mount Shasta to Mount McLoughlin to Mount Thielsen to the Three Sisters — South, Middle, and North — to Mount Washington to Three Fingered Jack to Mount Jefferson and finally to Mount Hood, which I’d traverse fifty-some miles before I reached the Bridge of the Gods. They were all volcanoes, ranging in elevation from a little under 8,000 to just over 14,000 feet. They were a small portion of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile-long series of volcanoes and oceanic trenches that rim the Pacific Ocean in a horseshoe shape from Chile, up along the western edge of Central and North America, across to Russia and Japan, and down through Indonesia and New Zealand, before culminating in Antarctica.

Down, down, down the trail went on my last full day of hiking in the Sierra Nevada. It was only seven miles to Belden from Three Lakes, but the trail descended a merciless 4,000 feet in the space of five of them. By the time I reached Belden, my feet were injured in an entirely new way: the tips of my toes were blistered. They’d slid forward with each step, pressed relentlessly against the toe ends of my boots. This was supposed to be my easy day, but I dragged into Belden Town limping in agony, observing that, in fact, it wasn’t a town. It was a rambling building near a railroad track. The building contained a bar and a small store, which also served as a post office, a tiny laundromat, and a shower house. I pulled off my boots on the store’s porch, put my camp sandals on, and hobbled inside to collect my box. Soon I had my envelope with twenty dollars, the sight of it such a tremendous relief that I forgot about my toes for a minute. I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade and returned to the porch to drink them, one after the other.

“Cool shirt,” a woman said. She had short curly gray hair and a big white dog on a leash. “This is Odin.” She bent to scratch his neck, then stood and pushed her little round glasses back into place on her nose and fixed me in her curious gaze. “Are you, by chance, hiking the PCT?”

Her name was Trina. She was a fifty-year-old high school English teacher from Colorado who’d begun her hike only a couple of days before. She’d left Belden Town, hiking north on the PCT, only to be met by enough snow on the trail that she’d returned. Her report filled me with gloom. Would I ever escape the snow? As we talked, another hiker walked up — a woman named Stacy who had also begun her hike the day before, coming up the same road I had to reach Three Lakes.

At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives. Trina was an avid weekend backpacker, Stacy an experienced trekker who’d hiked the PCT with a friend from Mexico to Belden Town the previous summer. Stacy and I talked about the places on the trail we’d both been, about Ed in Kennedy Meadows, whom she’d met the summer before, and about her life in a desert town in southern California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s company and took her summers off to hike. She was thirty and from a big Irish family, pale, pretty, and black-haired.

“Let’s camp together for the night and make a plan,” said Trina. “There’s a spot over in that meadow.” She pointed to a place visible from the store. We walked there and pitched our tents. I unpacked my box while Trina and Stacy talked on the grass. Waves of pleasure came over me as I picked up each item and held it instinctively to my nose. The pristine packets of Lipton noodles or dehydrated beans and rice that I ate for dinner, the still shiny Clif bars and immaculate ziplock bags of dried fruit and nuts. I was sick to death of these things, but seeing them new and unsullied restored something in me. There was the fresh T-shirt I didn’t need now that I had my Bob Marley shirt, two brand-new pair of wool socks, and a copy of Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which I wasn’t quite ready for yet — I’d burned my way through only about half the pages of The Novel, tossing them that morning in Paco’s fire. And, most important, a fresh supply of 2nd Skin.

I took off my boots and sat down, doctoring my chawed-up feet. When Trina’s dog began to bark, I looked up and saw a young man, blond, blue-eyed, and lanky. I knew in an instant that he was a PCT hiker by the drag of his gait. His name was Brent, and once he introduced himself I greeted him like an old friend, though I’d never met him. I’d heard stories about him back in Kennedy Meadows. He’d grown up in a small town in Montana, Greg, Albert, and Matt had told me. He’d once gone into a deli in a town near the trail in southern California, ordered a sandwich with two pounds of roast beef in it, and eaten it in six bites. He laughed when I reminded him about it, and then he took his pack off and squatted down to get a closer look at my feet.

“Your boots are too small,” he said, echoing what Greg had told me back in Sierra City. I stared at him vacantly. My boots couldn’t be too small. They were the only boots I had.

“I think it was just all that descending from Three Lakes,” I said.

“But that’s the point,” replied Brent. “With the right size boots, you’d be able to descend without hashing up your feet. That’s what boots are for, so you can descend.”

I thought of the good people of REI. I remembered the man who made me walk up and down a small wooden ramp in the store for just this reason: to make sure my toes didn’t bang up against the ends of my boots when I went down and that my heels didn’t rub against the backs when I went up. They hadn’t seemed to in the store. There was no question now that I’d been wrong or that my feet had grown or that there was any denying that as long as I had these boots on my feet, I was in a living hell.

But there was nothing to be done. I didn’t have the money to buy a new pair or any place to do it if I did. I put on my camp sandals and walked back to the store, where I paid a dollar to take a shower and dressed in my rain gear while my clothes washed and dried in the two-machine laundromat. I called Lisa while I waited and was elated when she answered the phone. We talked about her life and I told her what I could convey of mine. Together we went over my new itinerary. After we hung up, I signed the PCT hiker register and scanned it to see when Greg had passed through. His name wasn’t there. It seemed impossible that he was behind me.

“Have you heard anything about Greg?” I asked Brent when I returned wearing my clean clothes.

“He dropped out because of the snow.”

I looked at him, stunned. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?”

I shook my head.

“They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.”

It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT — the Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT. Both were designated national scenic trails in 1968. The AT is 2,175 miles long, approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine.

“Did Greg go to the AT too?” I squeaked.

“Nah. He didn’t want to keep missing so much of the trail, doing all these bypasses and taking alternate routes, so he’s coming back to hike it next year instead. That’s what the Australians told me, anyway.”

“Wow,” I said, feeling sick at the news. Greg had been a talisman for me since the day I met him in the very hour I’d decided to quit. He’d believed that if he could do this, I could too, and now he was gone. So were the Australians, a pair I’d never met, but a picture of them formed instantly in my mind anyway. I knew without knowing that they were buff and Amazonian, dazzlingly fit for the rugged outdoors by virtue of their Australian blood in ways I would never be. “Why aren’t you going to hike the AT instead?” I asked, worried he’d reveal that in fact he was.

He thought about it for a while. “Too much traffic,” he said. He continued looking at me, at Bob Marley’s face so big on my chest, as if he had more to say. “That’s a seriously awesome shirt, by the way.”

I’d never set foot on the AT, but I’d heard much about it from the guys at Kennedy Meadows. It was the PCT’s closest kin and yet also its opposite in many ways. About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer, and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year. Hikers on the AT spent most nights camping in or near group shelters that existed along the trail. On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing but a post office and a bar or tiny store. I imagined the Australian honeymooners on the AT now, eating cheeseburgers and guzzling beer in a pub a couple of miles from the trail, sleeping by night under a wooden roof. They’d probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming people too. Half the time that Greg, Matt, and Albert had talked about Brent they’d referred to him as the Kid, though he was only a few years younger than me. Greg had been occasionally called the Statistician because he knew so many facts and figures about the trail and he worked as an accountant. Matt and Albert were the Eagle Scouts, and Doug and Tom the Preppies. I didn’t think I’d been dubbed anything, but I got the sinking feeling that if I had, I didn’t want to know what it was.

Trina, Stacy, Brent, and I ate dinner in the bar that adjoined the Belden store that evening. After paying for a shower, laundry, the Snapple, and a few snacks and incidentals, I had about fourteen bucks left. I ordered a green salad and a plate of fries, the two items on the menu that both were cheap and satisfied my deepest cravings, which veered in opposite directions: fresh and deep-fried. Together they cost me five dollars, so now I had nine left to get me all the way to my next box. It was 134 miles away at McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, which had a concessionaire’s store that allowed PCT hikers to use it as a resupply stop. I drank my ice water miserably while the others sipped their beers. As we ate, we discussed the section ahead. By all reports, long stretches of it were socked in. The handsome bartender overheard our conversation and approached to tell us that rumor had it that Lassen Volcanic National Park was still buried under seventeen feet of snow. They were dynamiting the roads so they could open it for even a short tourist season this year.

“You want a drink?” he said to me, catching my eye. “On the house,” he added when he saw my hesitation.

He brought me a glass of cold pinot gris, filled to the rim. When I sipped it I felt instantly dizzy with pleasure, just as I had when I drank the Hawaiian screwdriver the night before. By the time we paid our bill, we’d decided that when we hiked away from Belden in the morning, we’d follow a combination of lower-elevation jeep roads and the PCT for about fifty miles before hitchhiking a bypass of a socked-in section of the trail in Lassen Volcanic National Park, catching the PCT again at a place called Old Station.

After we returned to our camp, I sat in my chair writing a letter to Joe on a piece of paper I’d torn from my journal. His birthday was approaching and the wine had made me nostalgic for him. I remembered walking with him one night a year before with a miniskirt on and nothing underneath and having sex with him against a stone wall in a private cove of a public park. I remembered the giddy surge of emotion I’d felt every time we scored another bit of heroin and how the dye from his hair had stained my pillowcase blue. I didn’t let myself write those things in the letter. I sat holding my pen, only thinking of them and also of the things I could tell him about my time on the PCT. It seemed impossible to make him understand all that had happened in the month since I’d seen him in Portland. My memories of last summer felt as foreign to me as my description of this summer would likely seem to him, so instead I mostly asked him a long list of questions, wondering how he was, what he was doing, who he was spending time with, and if he’d yet made the escape he’d alluded to in the postcard he’d sent me at Kennedy Meadows and gotten clean. I hoped he had. Not for me, but for him. I folded the letter and put it into an envelope that Trina had given me. I picked a few wildflowers from the meadow and pressed them inside before sealing the envelope shut.

“I’m going to mail this,” I said to the others, and followed the light of my headlamp over the grass and along the dirt path to the mailbox outside the shuttered store.

“Hey, good-looking,” a man’s voice called to me after I put the letter in the box. I saw only the burning end of a cigarette on the dark porch.

“Hi,” I answered uncertainly.

“It’s me. The bartender,” the man said, stepping forward into the faint light so I could see his face. “How’d you like your wine?” he asked.

“Oh. Hi. Yeah. That was really nice of you. Thanks.”

“I’m still working,” he said, flicking the ash of his cigarette into a planter. “But I’ll be off in a bit. My trailer’s just across the way, if you wanna come over and party. I can get a whole bottle of that pinot gris you liked.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got to get up early and hike in the morning.”

He took another drag of his cigarette, the end burning brightly. I’d watched him a bit after he’d brought me the wine. I guessed he was thirty. He looked good in his jeans. Why shouldn’t I go with him?

“Well, you’ve got time to think about it, if you change your mind,” he said.

“I’ve got to hike nineteen miles tomorrow,” I replied, as if that meant anything to him.

“You could sleep at my place,” he said. “I’d give you my bed. I could sleep on the couch, if you wanted. I bet a bed would feel good after you’ve been sleeping on the ground.”

“I’m all set up over there.” I gestured toward the meadow.

I walked back to my camp feeling queasy, equal parts flustered and flattered by his interest, a shot of bald desire quaking through me. The women had zipped themselves into their tents for the night by the time I returned, but Brent was still awake, standing in the dark, gazing up at the stars.

“Beautiful, huh?” I whispered, gazing up with him. As I did so, it occurred to me that I’d not cried once since I’d set foot on the trail. How could that be? After all the crying I’d done, it seemed impossible that it was true, but it was. I almost burst into tears with the realization, but I laughed instead.

“What’s so funny?” Brent asked.

“Nothing.” I looked at my watch. It was 10:15. “I’m usually sound asleep by now.”

“Me too,” said Brent.

“But I’m wide awake tonight.”

“It’s ’cause we’re so excited to be in town,” he said.

We both laughed. I’d been savoring the company of the women all day, grateful for the kinds of conversation that I’d seldom had since starting the PCT, but it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar. As I stood next to him, I realized he reminded me of my brother, who, in spite of our distance, I loved more than anyone.

“We should make a wish,” I said to Brent.

“Don’t you have to wait till you see a shooting star?” he asked.

“Traditionally, yes. But we can make up new rules,” I said. “Like, I want boots that don’t hurt my feet.”

“You’re not supposed to say it out loud!” he said, exasperated. “It’s like blowing out your birthday candles. You can’t tell anyone what your wish is. Now it’s not going to come true. Your feet are totally fucked.”

“Not necessarily,” I said indignantly, though I felt sick with the knowledge that he was right.

“Okay, I made mine. Now it’s your turn,” he said.

I stared at a star, but my mind only went from one thing to the next. “How early are you taking off tomorrow?” I asked.

“At first light.”

“Me too,” I said. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him the next morning. Trina, Stacy, and I had decided to hike and camp together the next couple of days, but Brent hiked faster than us, which meant he’d go on alone.

“So did you make your wish?” he asked.

“I’m still thinking.”

“It’s a good time to make one,” he said. “It’s our last night in the Sierra Nevada.”

“Goodbye, Range of Light,” I said to the sky.

“You could wish for a horse,” Brent said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about your feet.”

I looked at him in the dark. It was true — the PCT was open to both hikers and pack animals, though I hadn’t yet encountered any horseback riders on the trail. “I used to have a horse,” I said, turning my gaze back to the sky. “I had two, actually.”

“Well then, you’re lucky,” he said. “Not everyone gets a horse.”

We were silent together for several moments.

I made my wish.