Wild : From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

15 BOX OF RAIN

I woke in the darkness on my second-to-last night in California to the sound of wind whipping the branches of the trees and the tap-tapping of rain against my tent. It had been so dry all summer long that I’d stopped putting the rain cover on, sleeping with only a wide pane of mesh between the sky and me. I scrambled barefoot into the dark to pull my rain cover over my tent, shivering, though it was early August. It had been in the nineties for weeks, sometimes even reaching a hundred, but with the wind and the rain, the weather had suddenly shifted. Back in my tent, I put on my fleece leggings and anorak, crawled into my sleeping bag, and zipped it all the way up to my chin, cinching its hood tight around my head. When I woke at six, the little thermometer on my backpack said that it was 37 degrees.

I hiked along a high ridgeline in the rain, dressed in most of what I had. Each time I stopped for more than a few minutes, I grew so chilled that my teeth chattered comically until I walked on and began to sweat again. On clear days, my guidebook claimed, Oregon was in view to the north, but I couldn’t see anything for the thick fog that obscured anything beyond ten feet. I didn’t need to see Oregon. I could feel it, huge before me. I would walk its entire length if I made it all the way to the Bridge of the Gods. Who would I be if I did? Who would I be if I didn’t?

Midmorning, Stacy appeared out of the mist, walking southbound on the trail. We’d hiked away from Seiad Valley together the day before, after spending a night with Rex and the couples. In the morning, Rex had caught a bus back to his real life, while the rest of us walked on, splitting up a few hours out. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see the couples on the trail again, but Stacy and I had made plans to meet up in Ashland, where she was going to lay over for a few days waiting for her friend Dee to arrive before they began their hike through Oregon. Seeing her now startled me, as if she were part woman, part ghost.

“I’m heading back to Seiad Valley,” she said, and explained that she was cold, her feet were blistered, and her down sleeping bag had gotten drenched the night before and she had no hope of drying it out before nightfall. “I’m taking a bus to Ashland,” she said. “Come find me at the hostel when you get there.”

I hugged her before she walked away, the fog enveloping her again in seconds.

The next morning I woke earlier than normal, the sky the palest gray. It had stopped raining and the air had warmed up. I felt excited as I strapped on Monster and walked away from my camp: these were my last miles in California.

I was less than a mile away from the border when a branch that hung along the edge of the trail caught on my William J. Crockett bracelet and sent it flying off into the dense brush. I scanned the rocks and bushes and trees, panicky, knowing as I pushed into the weeds that it was a lost cause. I wouldn’t find the bracelet. I hadn’t seen where it had gone. It had only made the faintest ping as it flew away from me. It seemed absurd that I’d lose the bracelet at this very moment, a clear omen of trouble ahead. I tried to twist it around in my mind and make the loss represent something good — a symbol of things I didn’t need anymore, perhaps, of lightening the figurative load — but then that idea flattened out and I thought only of William J. Crockett himself, the man from Minnesota who’d been about my age when he died in Vietnam, whose remains had never been found, whose family no doubt still grieved him. My bracelet wasn’t anything but a symbol of the life he lost too young. The universe had simply taken it into its hungry, ruthless maw.

There was nothing to do but go on.

I reached the border only minutes later, stopping to take it in: California and Oregon, an end and a beginning pressed up against each other. For such a momentous spot, it didn’t look all that momentous. There was only a brown metal box that held a trail register and a sign that said WASHINGTON: 498 MILES — no mention of Oregon itself.

But I knew what those 498 miles were. I’d been in California two months, but it seemed like I’d aged years since I’d stood on Tehachapi Pass alone with my pack and imagined reaching this spot. I went to the metal box, pulled out the trail register, and paged through it, reading the entries from the previous weeks. There were notes from a few people whose names I’d never seen and others from people I hadn’t met, but whom I felt I knew because I’d been trailing them all summer. The most recent entries were from the couples — John and Sarah, Helen and Sam. Beneath their jubilant entries, I wrote my own, so overwhelmed with emotion that I opted to be concise: “I made it!”

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

I was here. I walked into it, catching views of the peaks of majestic Mount Shasta to the south and the lower but sterner Mount McLoughlin to the north. I hiked high on a ridgeline, coming to short icy patches of snow that I crossed with the help of my ski pole. I could see cows grazing in the high green meadows not far below me, their big square bells clanking as they moved. “Hello, Oregon cows,” I called to them.

That night I camped under a nearly full moon, the sky bright and cool. I opened J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, but read only a few pages because I couldn’t concentrate; my mind wandered to thoughts of Ashland instead. It was finally so close that I could bear to let myself think about it. In Ashland there would be food, music, and wine, and people who knew nothing of the PCT. And most important, there’d be money, and not just my usual twenty bucks. I’d put $250 in traveler’s checks into my Ashland box, originally believing that it would be the box that greeted me at the very end of my trip. It didn’t contain food or resupplies. It had only traveler’s checks and a “real world” outfit to wear — my favorite faded blue Levi’s and a slim-fitting black T-shirt; a brand-new black lace bra and matching underwear. It was in these things that months before I thought I’d celebrate the end of my trip and catch a ride back to Portland. When I’d changed my itinerary, I’d asked Lisa to put that small box into another of the boxes I’d loaded down with food and supplies and readdress it to Ashland, instead of one of the stops I wasn’t going to make in the Sierra Nevada. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it — that box within the box — and spend the weekend wearing nontrail clothes.

I arrived in Ashland the next day around lunchtime, after hitching a ride from the trail with a group of AmeriCorps volunteers.

“Did you hear the big news?” one of them had asked after I’d climbed into their van.

I shook my head without explaining that I’d heard little news, big or small, for two months.

“You know the Grateful Dead?” he asked, and I nodded. “Jerry Garcia is dead.”

I stood on a sidewalk in the center of town and bent to see an image of Garcia’s face in psychedelic colors on the front page of the local paper, reading what I could through the newspaper box’s clear plastic window, too broke to spring for a copy. I’d liked several of the Grateful Dead’s songs, but I’d never collected tapes of their live shows or followed them around the country like some of my Deadhead friends had. Kurt Cobain’s death the year before had felt closer to me — his sad and violent end a cautionary tale not only of my generation’s excesses, but of my own as well. And yet Garcia’s death felt bigger, as if it was the end of not just a moment, but an era that had lasted all of my life.

I walked with Monster on my back a few blocks to the post office, passing homemade signs propped in store windows that said: WE LOVE YOU, JERRY, RIP. The streets were alive with a mix of well-dressed tourists pouring in for the weekend and the radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest, who congregated in clumps along the sidewalks emitting a more intense vibe than usual because of the news. “Hey,” several of them said to me as I passed, some adding “sister” to the end. They ranged in age from teenager to senior citizen, clad in clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk rock/funked-out artist continuum. I looked just like one of them — hairy, tan, and tattooed; weighed down by all of my possessions — and I smelled like one of them too, only worse, no doubt, since I hadn’t had a proper bath since I’d showered at that campground in Castle Crags when I’d been hungover a couple of weeks before. And yet I felt so outside of them, of everyone, as if I’d landed here from another place and time.

“Hey!” I exclaimed with surprise when I passed one of the quiet men who’d been in the truck that had pulled up at Toad Lake, where Stacy and I had been searching for the Rainbow Gathering, but he replied with a stony nod, not seeming to remember me.

I reached the post office and pushed its doors open, grinning with anticipation, but when I gave the woman behind the counter my name, she returned with only a small padded envelope addressed to me. No box. No box within the box. No Levi’s or black lace bra or $250 in traveler’s checks or the food I needed to hike to my next stop at Crater Lake National Park.

“There should be a box for me,” I said, holding the little padded envelope.

“You’ll have to check back tomorrow,” the woman said without concern.

“Are you sure?” I stammered. “I mean … It should definitely be there.”

The woman only shook her head unsympathetically. She cared nothing for me. I was a dirty, smelly radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest. “Next,” she said, signaling to the man standing at the head of the line.

I staggered outside, half blind with panic and rage. I was in Ashland, Oregon, and I had only $2.29. I needed to pay for a room at the hostel that night. I needed my food before I hiked on. But more than anything — after sixty days of walking beneath my pack, eating dehydrated foods that tasted like warmed-up cardboard, and being utterly without human contact for sometimes weeklong stretches while hiking up and down mountains in an astonishing range of temperatures and terrains — I needed things to be easy. Just for a few days. Please.

I went to a pay phone nearby, took Monster off and set it down, and shut myself into the phone booth. It felt incredibly good to be inside, like I didn’t ever want to leave this tiny transparent room. I looked at the padded envelope. It was from my friend Laura in Minneapolis. I opened the envelope and pulled its contents out: a letter folded around a necklace she’d made for me in honor of my new name. STRAYED it said in blocky silver letters on a ball-link chain. At first glance it looked like it said STARVED because the Y was slightly different from all the other letters — fatter and squatter and cast from a different mold, and my mind scrambled the letters into a familiar word. I put the necklace on and looked at the distorted reflection of my chest in the telephone’s glossy metal face. It hung beneath the one I’d been wearing since Kennedy Meadows — the turquoise-and-silver earring that used to belong to my mother.

I picked up the phone and attempted to make a collect call to Lisa to inquire about my box, but there was no answer.

I strolled the streets miserably, trying not to want anything. Not lunch, not the muffins and cookies that sat on display in the windows, not the lattes in the paper cups that the tourists held in their spotless hands. I walked to the hostel to see if I could find Stacy. She wasn’t there, the man who worked the desk told me, but she’d be back later — she’d already checked in for that night. “Would you like to check in too?” he asked me, but I only shook my head.

I walked to the natural food cooperative, the front of which the radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest had made into something of a daytime encampment, gathering on the grass and sidewalks in front of the store. Almost immediately, I spotted another of the men I’d seen up at Toad Lake — the headband man, the leader of the pack who, like Jimi Hendrix, called everybody baby. He sat on the sidewalk near the entrance to the store holding a little cardboard sign that had a request for money scrawled in marker across it. In front of him there was an empty coffee can with a smattering of coins.

“Hi,” I said, pausing before him, feeling buoyed to see a familiar face, even if it was his. He still wore his strange grubby headband.

“Howdy,” he replied, obviously not remembering me. He didn’t ask me for money. Apparently, I exuded the fact that I had none. “You traveling around?” he asked.

“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said to jog his memory.

He nodded without recognition. “A lot of people from out of town are showing up for the Dead festivities.”

“Are there festivities?” I asked.

“Tonight there’s something.”

I wondered if he’d convened a mini — Rainbow Gathering at Crater Lake, like he’d said he’d do, but not enough to ask him. “Take it easy,” I said, walking away.

I went into the co-op, the air-conditioned air so strange on my bare limbs. I’d been in convenience stores and small tourist-oriented general stores in a few of my resupply stops along the PCT, but I hadn’t been in a store like this since I’d begun my trip. I walked up and down the aisles looking at things I couldn’t have, stupefied by their offhand plenitude. How was it that I had ever taken these things for granted? Jars of pickles and baguettes so fresh they were packed in paper bags, bottles of orange juice and cartons of sorbet, and, most of all, the produce, which sat so brightly in bins I felt almost blinded by it. I lingered, smelling things — tomatoes and heads of butter lettuce, nectarines and limes. It was all I could do not to slip something into my pocket.

I went to the health and beauty section and pumped free samples of lotion into my palms, rubbing several kinds all over my body, their discrete fragrances making me swoon — peach and coconut, lavender and tangerine. I pondered the sample tubes of lipstick and applied one called Plum Haze with one of the natural, organic, made-from-recycled-material Q-tip knockoffs that sat nearby in a medicinal-looking glass jar with a silver lid. I blotted with a natural, organic, made-from-recycled-material tissue and gazed at myself in a round mirror that stood on a pedestal near the lipstick display. I’d chosen Plum Haze because its shade was similar to the lipstick I wore in my regular, pre-PCT life, but now, with it on, I seemed to look like a clown, my mouth showy and manic against my weathered face.

“Can I help you?” a woman with granny glasses and a nametag that said JEN G. asked me.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking.”

“That shade is nice on you. It totally brings out the blue of your eyes.”

“Do you think so?” I asked, feeling suddenly shy. I looked at myself in the little round mirror, as if I were genuinely contemplating whether to purchase Plum Haze.

“I like your necklace too,” Jen G. said. “Starved. That’s funny.”

I put my hand to it. “It says Strayed, actually. That’s my last name.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jen G. said, stepping closer to see it. “I just looked at it wrong. It’s funny both ways.”

“It’s an optical illusion,” I said.

I walked down the aisles to the deli, where I pulled a coarse napkin from a dispenser and wiped the Plum Haze off my lips, and then perused the lemonade selection. They didn’t carry Snapple, much to my chagrin. I bought a natural, organic, fresh-squeezed, no-preservatives lemonade with the last money I had and returned with it to sit in front of the store. In my excitement to reach town, I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I got a protein bar and some stale nuts from my pack and ate them while forbidding myself to think about the meal I’d planned to have instead: a Caesar salad with a grilled chicken breast and a basket of crusty French bread that I’d dunk into olive oil and a Diet Coke to drink, with a banana split for dessert. I drank my lemonade and chatted with whoever approached: I spoke to a man from Michigan who’d moved to Ashland to attend the local college, and another who played the drums in a band; one woman who was a potter who specialized in goddess figures, and another who asked me in a European accent if I was going to the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration that night.

She handed me a flyer that said Remembering Jerry across the top.

“It’s at a club near the hostel, if that’s where you’re staying,” she told me. She was plump and pretty, her flaxen hair tied into a loose bun at the back of her head. “We’re traveling around too,” she added, gesturing to my pack. I didn’t understand who the “we” referred to until a man appeared by her side. He was her physical opposite — tall and almost painfully thin, dressed in a maroon wrap skirt that hung barely past his bony knees, his shortish hair bound into four or five pigtails scattered around his head.

“Did you hitchhike here?” asked the man. He was American.

I explained to them about hiking the PCT, about how I planned to lay over in Ashland for the weekend. The man was indifferent, but the woman was astounded.

“My name is Susanna and I am from Switzerland,” she said, taking my hand in hers. “We call what you’re doing the pilgrim way. If you’d like, I would rub your feet.”

“Oh, that’s sweet, but you don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I want to. It would be my honor. It is the Swiss way. I will return.” She turned and walked into the co-op, as I called after her telling her she was too kind. When she was gone, I looked at her boyfriend. He reminded me of a Kewpie doll, with his hair like that.

“She really likes to do this, so no worries,” he said, sitting down beside me.

When Susanna emerged a minute later, she held her hands cupped before her, a puddle of fragrant oil in her palms. “It’s peppermint,” she said, smiling at me. “Take off your boots and socks!”

“But my feet,” I hesitated. “They’re in pretty rough shape and dirty—”

“This is my calling!” she yelled, so I obeyed; soon she was slathering me with peppermint oil. “Your feet, they are very strong,” said Susanna. “Like those of an animal. I can feel their strength in my palms. And also how they are battered. I see you miss the toenails.”

“Yes,” I murmured, reclining on my elbows in the grass, my eyes fluttering shut.

“The spirits told me to do this,” she said as she pressed her thumbs into the soles of my feet.

“The spirits told you?”

“Yes. When I saw you, the spirits whispered that I had something to give you, so that is why I approached with the flyer, but then I understood there was something else. In Switzerland, we have great respect for people who travel the pilgrim way.” Rolling my toes one by one between her fingers, she looked up at me and asked, “What does this mean on your necklace — that you are starved?”

And so it went, for the next couple of hours, as I hung out in front of the co-op. I was starved. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt only like a bucket of desire, a hungry, wilted thing. One person gave me a vegan muffin, another a quinoa salad that had grapes in it. Several approached to admire my horse tattoo or inquire about my backpack. Around four, Stacy came along and I told her my predicament; she offered to loan me money until my box arrived.

“Let me try at the post office again,” I said, loath to take her up on her offer, grateful as I was for it. I returned to the post office and stood in line, disappointed to see that the same woman who’d told me my box wasn’t there was still working the counter. When I approached her, I asked for my box as if I hadn’t been there only a few hours before. She went into a back room and returned holding it, pushing it across the counter to me without apology.

“So it was here all along,” I said, but she didn’t care, replying that she simply must not have seen it before.

I was too ecstatic to be angry as I walked with Stacy to the hostel, holding my box. I checked in and followed Stacy up the stairs and through the main women’s dorm room to a small, private alcove that sat under the eaves of the building. Inside, there were three single beds. Stacy had one, her friend Dee had another, and they’d saved the third for me. Stacy introduced me to Dee and we talked while I opened my box. There were my clean old jeans, my new bra and underwear, and more money than I’d had since I started my trip.

I went to the shower room and stood under the hot water scrubbing myself. I hadn’t showered for two weeks, during which the temperatures had ranged from the thirties to the low hundreds. I could feel the water washing the layers of sweat away, as if they were an actual layer of skin. When I was done, I gazed at myself naked in the mirror, my body leaner than the last time I’d looked, my hair lighter than it had been since I was a little girl. I put on the new black bra, underwear, and T-shirt and my faded Levi’s, which were loose on me now, though I hadn’t quite been able to fit into them three months before, and returned to the alcove and put on my boots. They were no longer new — dirty and hot, heavy and painful — but they were the only shoes I had.

At dinner with Stacy and Dee, I ordered everything I desired. Afterwards, I went to a shoe store and bought a black and blue pair of Merrell sports sandals, the kind I should’ve sprung for before my trip. We returned to the hostel, but within minutes Stacy and I were out again, headed for the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration at a nearby club, leaving Dee behind to sleep. We sat at a table in a little roped-off area that bordered the dance floor, drinking white wine and watching women of all ages, shapes, and sizes and an occasional man spinning to the Grateful Dead songs that played one after another. Behind the dancers, there was a screen upon which a series of images were projected, some abstract, psychedelic swirls, others literal, drawn renditions of Jerry and his band.

“We love you, Jerry!” a woman at the next table belted out when an image of him appeared.

“Are you going to dance?” I asked Stacy.

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back to the hostel. We’re heading out early in the morning.”

“I think I’m going to stay for a bit,” I said. “Wake me up to say goodbye if I’m still sleeping tomorrow.” After she left, I ordered another glass of wine and sat listening to the music, watching people, feeling a profound happiness to simply be in a room among others on a summer evening with music playing. When I rose to leave half an hour later, the song “Box of Rain” came on. It was one of my favorite Dead songs and I was a bit buzzed, so I impulsively shot out to the dance floor and began to dance, and then regretted it almost as quickly. My knees felt stiff and creaky from all the hiking, my hips strangely inflexible, but just as I was about to leave, the man from Michigan, whom I’d met earlier in the day, was suddenly upon me, seemingly dancing with me, spinning in and out of my orbit like a hippy gyroscope, drawing an imaginary box in the air with his fingers while nodding at me, as if I knew what the hell that meant, and so it seemed rude to leave.

“I always think of Oregon when I hear this song,” he shouted over the music as I moved my body in a faux boogie. “Get it?” he asked. “Box of rain? Like Oregon is a box of rain too?”

I nodded and laughed, attempting to seem as if I were having a fun time, but the moment the song ended, I bolted away to stand near a low wall that ran alongside the bar.

“Hey,” a man said to me after a while, and I turned. He stood on the other side of the waist-high wall holding a marker and a flashlight — an employee of the club, apparently manning the territory in which you could drink — though I hadn’t noticed him there before.

“Hey,” I said back. He was handsome and looked a bit older than me, his dark curls skimming the tops of his shoulders. WILCO it said across the front of his T-shirt. “I love that band,” I said, gesturing to his shirt.

“You know them?” he asked.

“Of course I know them,” I said.

His brown eyes crinkled into a smile. “Rad,” he said, “I’m Jonathan,” and he shook my hand. The music started up before I could tell him my name, but he leaned into my ear to ask in a delicate shout where I was from. He seemed to know I wasn’t from Ashland. I shouted back at him, explaining as concisely as I could about the PCT, and then he leaned toward my ear again and yelled a long sentence that I couldn’t make out over the music, but I didn’t mind because of the wonderful way his lips brushed against my hair and his breath tickled my neck so I could feel it all the way down my body.

“What?” I yelled back at him when he was done, and so he did it again, talking slower and louder this time, and I understood that he was telling me that he worked late tonight, but that tomorrow night he’d be off at eleven and would I like to come see the band that was performing and then go out with him afterwards?

“Sure!” I shouted, though I half wanted to make him repeat what he’d said so his mouth would do that thing to my hair and my neck again. He handed the marker to me and mimed that I should write my name on his palm so he’d be able to put me on the guest list. Cheryl Strayed, I wrote as neatly as I could, my hands shaking. When I was done, he looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up, and I waved and walked out the door feeling ecstatic.

I had a date.

Did I have a date? I walked the warm streets second-guessing myself. Maybe my name wouldn’t be on the list, after all. Maybe I’d misheard him. Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less, but this was different. I was different. Wasn’t I?

I went back to the hostel and walked quietly past the beds where women unknown to me lay sleeping and into the little alcove under the eaves, where Dee and Stacy slept too, and I took off my clothes and got into the real actual bed that was astoundingly mine for the night. I lay awake for an hour, running my hands over my body, imagining what it would feel like to Jonathan if he touched it the next night: the mounds of my breasts and the plain of my abdomen, the muscles of my legs and the coarse hair on my pudenda — all of that seemed passably okay — but when I got to the palm-sized patches on my hips that felt like a cross between tree bark and a plucked dead chicken, I realized that under no circumstances while on my date tomorrow could I take off my pants. It was probably just as well. God knows I’d taken off my pants too many times to count, certainly more than was good for me.

I spent the next day talking myself out of seeing Jonathan that night. All the time that I was doing my laundry, feasting at restaurants, and wandering the streets watching people, I asked myself, Who is this good-looking Wilco fan to me anyway? And yet all the while, my mind kept imagining the things we might do.

With my pants still on.

That evening I showered, dressed, and walked to the co-op to put on some Plum Haze lipstick and ylang-ylang oil from the free samples before strolling up to the woman who staffed the door at the club where Jonathan worked. “I might be on the list,” I said casually, and gave her my name, ready to be rebuffed.

Without a word, she stamped my hand with red ink.

Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which would compel him to wonder, Why is this woman always looking at me? So then I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not only was he looking at me, but he also waved again.

I waved back.

I turned away and stood extra still and upright, acutely aware of myself as an object of hot and exquisite beauty, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on my 100-percent-muscle ass and thighs, my breasts held high by the sweet bra beneath my slim-fitting shirt, my extra-light hair and bronze skin, my blue eyes made even bluer by the Plum Haze lipstick — a feeling which lasted for about the length of one song, at which point it reversed itself and I realized that I was a hideous beast with tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips and a too-tan, chawed-up face and weather-beaten hair and a lower abdomen that — in spite of all the exercise and deprivation and the backpack strap that for two months had squeezed it into what you’d guess would be oblivion — still had an indisputably rounded shape unless I was lying down or holding it in. In profile, my nose was so prominent a friend had once observed that I was reminiscent of a shark. And my lips — my ludicrous and ostentatious lips! Discreetly, I pressed them to the back of my hand to obliterate the Plum Haze while the music bleated on.

There was, thank God, an intermission. Jonathan materialized by my side, squeezing my hand solicitously, saying he was glad I’d come, asking if I wanted another glass of wine.

I did not. I only wanted it to be eleven o’clock so he’d leave with me and I could stop wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle and whether he was looking at me or he thought I was looking at him.

We still had an hour and a half to go.

“So what should we do, afterwards?” he asked. “Have you had dinner?”

I told him I had, but that I was up for anything. I didn’t mention I was currently capable of eating approximately four dinners in a row.

“I live on an organic farm about fifteen miles from here. It’s pretty cool at night, to walk around. We could go out there and I’ll drive you back when you’re ready.”

“Okay,” I said, running my little turquoise-and-silver earring necklace along its delicate chain. I’d opted not to wear my Strayed/Starved necklace, in case Jonathan thought it was the latter. “Actually, I think I’m going to step out for some air,” I said. “But I’ll be back at eleven.”

“Rad,” he said, reaching over to give my hand another squeeze before he returned to his station and the band started up.

I walked giddily out into the night, the tiny red nylon bag that normally held my stove swinging on its cord from my wrist. I’d ditched most such bags and containers back in Kennedy Meadows, unwilling to carry the extra weight, but this bag I’d held on to, believing the stove needed its protection. I’d changed it into a purse for my days in Ashland, though it smelled faintly of gasoline. The things inside it were all secured in a ziplock bag that served as a very unfancy inner purse — my money, my driver’s license, lip balm and a comb, and the card that the workers at the hostel had given me so I could get Monster and my ski pole and my box of food out of their storage area.

“Howdy,” said a man who stood on the sidewalk outside the bar. “You like the band?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Yeah.” I smiled at him politely. He looked to be in his late forties, dressed in jeans and suspenders and a frayed T-shirt. He had a long frizzy beard that went to his chest and a straight rim of graying hair that reached his shoulders from beneath the bald dome on top of his head.

“I came down here from the mountains. I like to come and hear music sometimes,” the man said.

“I did too. Came down from the mountains, I mean.”

“Where do you live?”

“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.”

“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “The PCT. I’ve been up on it before. My place is in the other direction. I’ve got a tepee up there that I live in about four or five months out of the year.”

“You live in a tepee?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yep. Just me. I like it, but it gets lonely sometimes. My name’s Clyde, by the way.” He held out his hand.

“I’m Cheryl,” I said, shaking it.

“You want to come and have a cup of tea with me?”

“Actually, thanks, but I’m waiting for a friend to get off work.” I glanced at the club’s door, as if Jonathan would emerge from it any moment.

“Well, my truck’s right here, so we wouldn’t be going anywhere,” he said, gesturing to an old milk truck in the parking lot. “That’s where I live when I’m not in my tepee. I’ve been experimenting with being a hermit for years, but sometimes it’s nice to come to town and hear a band.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. I liked him and his gentle way. He reminded me of a few of the men I knew in northern Minnesota. Guys who’d been friends with my mom and Eddie, searching and open-hearted, solidly outside the mainstream. I’d rarely seen any of them since my mom died. It felt now as if I’d never known them and I couldn’t know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I’d grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.

“Well, nice to meet you, Cheryl,” Clyde said. “I’m going to go put my kettle on for tea. You’re welcome to join me, like I say.”

“Sure,” I said immediately. “I’ll take a cup of tea.”

I’ve never seen a house inside a truck that failed to strike me as the coolest thing in the world and Clyde’s was no different. Orderly and efficient, elegant and artful, funky and utilitarian. There was a woodstove and a tiny kitchen, a row of candles and a string of Christmas lights that cast enchanting shadows around the room. A shelf lined with books wound around three sides of the truck, with a wide bed tucked against it. I kicked off my new sandals and lay across the bed, pulling books off the shelf as Clyde put the kettle on. There were books about being a monk and others about people who lived in caves; about people who lived in the Arctic and the Amazon forest and on an island off the coast of Washington State.

“It’s chamomile that I grew myself,” Clyde said, pouring the hot water into a pot once it boiled. While it steeped, he lit a few of the candles and came over and sat next to me on the bed, where I lay belly-down and propped up on my elbows, paging through an illustrated book about Hindu gods and goddesses.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page.

“I don’t,” he said. “I believe we’re here once and what we do matters. What do you believe?”

“I’m still trying to figure out what I believe,” I answered, taking the hot mug he held out to me.

“I have something else for us, if you’d like, a little something I harvested up in the woods.” He pulled a gnarly root that looked like ginger from his pocket and showed it to me in his palm. “It’s chewable opium.”

“Opium?” I asked.

“Except it’s way more mellow. It just gives you a relaxed high. You want some?”

“Sure,” I said reflexively, and watched as he sliced off a piece and handed it to me, sliced another piece off for himself and put it in his mouth.

“You chew it?” I asked, and he nodded. I put it into my mouth and chewed. It was like eating wood. It took a moment for me to realize that maybe it would be best to steer entirely clear of opium, or any root that a strange man gave me, for that matter, regardless of how nice and non-threatening he seemed. I spit it into my hand.

“You don’t like it?” he said, laughing and lifting a small trash can so I could toss it in.

I sat talking to Clyde in his truck until eleven, when he walked me to the front door of the club. “Good luck up there in the woods,” he said, and we embraced.

A moment later, Jonathan appeared and led me to his car, an old Buick Skylark he called Beatrice.

“So how was work?” I asked. Sitting beside him at last, I didn’t feel nervous the way I had when I’d been in the bar and he’d been watching me.

“Good,” he said. As we drove into the darkness beyond Ashland, he told me about living on the organic farm, which was owned by friends of his. He lived there free in exchange for some work, he explained, glancing over at me, his face softly lit by the glow of the dash. He turned down one road and another until I had absolutely no sense of where I was in relation to Ashland, which for me really meant where I was in relation to Monster. I regretted not having brought it. I hadn’t been so far from my pack since I began the PCT, and it felt strange. Jonathan turned in to a driveway, drove past an unlit house where a dog barked, and followed a rutted dirt road that took us back among rows of corn and flowers until finally the headlights swooped across a large boxy tent that was erected on a wooden platform and he parked.

“That’s my place,” he said, and we got out. The air was cooler than it had been in Ashland. I shivered and Jonathan put his arm around me so casually it felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. We walked among the corn and the flowers under the full moon, discussing the various bands and musicians one or the other or both of us loved, recounting stories from shows we’d seen.

“I’ve seen Michelle Shocked live three times,” Jonathan said.

“Three times?”

“One time I drove through a snowstorm for the show. There were only like ten people in the audience.”

“Wow,” I said, realizing there was no way I was going to keep my pants on with a man who’d seen Michelle Shocked three times, no matter how repulsive the flesh on my hips was.

“Wow,” he said back to me, his brown eyes finding mine in the dark.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow,” he repeated.

We’d said only one word, but I felt suddenly confused. We didn’t seem to be talking about Michelle Shocked anymore.

“What kind of flowers are these?” I asked, pointing to the stalks that blossomed all around us, suddenly terrified that he was going to kiss me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss him. It was that I hadn’t kissed anyone since I’d kissed Joe more than two months before, and every time I’d gone that long without kissing, I’d become sure that I’d forgotten how to do it. To delay the kiss, I asked him about his job at the farm and his job at the club, and about where he was from and who his family was, and who his last girlfriend was and how long they’d been together and why they’d broken up, and all the while he barely answered me and asked me nothing in return.

It didn’t matter much to me. His hand around my shoulder felt good, and then it felt even better when he moved it to my waist and by the time we’d circled back to his tent on the platform and he turned to kiss me and I realized I still did, indeed, know how to kiss, all the things he hadn’t exactly answered or asked me fell away.

“This has been really cool,” he said, and we smiled at each other in that daffy way two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. “I’m glad you came out here.”

“Me too,” I said. I was intensely aware of his hands on my waist, so warm through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, skimming the top edge of my jeans. We were standing in the space between Jonathan’s car and his tent. They were the two directions I could go: either back to my bed under the eaves in the hostel in Ashland alone, or into his bed with him.

“Look at the sky,” he said. “All the stars.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, though I didn’t look at the sky. Instead, I scanned the dark land, punctuated by tiny dots of light, houses and farms spread out over the valley. I thought of Clyde, all alone under this same sky, reading good books in his truck. I wondered where the PCT was. It seemed far away. I realized that I hadn’t said anything to Jonathan about it other than the bit I’d shouted into his ear over the music the night before. He hadn’t asked.

“I don’t know what it was,” Jonathan said. “The minute I saw you, I knew I had to come over and talk to you. I knew you’d be totally rad.”

“You’re rad too,” I said, though I never used the word rad.

He leaned forward and kissed me again and I kissed him back with more fervor than I had before, and we stood there kissing and kissing between his tent and his car with the corn and the flowers and the stars and the moon all around us, and it felt like the nicest thing in the world, my hands running slowly up into his curly hair and down over his thick shoulders and along his strong arms and around to his brawny back, holding his gorgeous male body against mine. There hasn’t ever been a time that I’ve done that that I haven’t remembered all over again how much I love men.

“Do you want to go inside?” Jonathan asked.

I nodded and he told me to wait so he could go in and turn on the lights and the heat, then he returned a moment later, holding the door flaps of the tent open for me, and I stepped inside.

It wasn’t a tent like the sort of tent I’d spent any time in. It was a luxury suite. Warmed by a tiny heater and tall enough to stand up in, with room to walk around in the area that wasn’t consumed by the double bed that sat in the center. On either side of the bed there were little cardboard dressers on top of which sat two battery-operated lights that looked like candles.

“Sweet,” I said, standing next to him in the small space between the door and the end of his bed, then he pulled me toward him and we kissed again.

“I feel funny asking this,” he said after a while. “I don’t want to presume, because it’s fine with me if we just, you know, hang out — which would be totally rad — or if you want me to take you back to the hostel — right now, even, if that’s what you want to do, though I hope it isn’t what you want to do. But … before — I mean, not that we’re necessarily going to do this — but in case we … I mean, I don’t have anything, any diseases or anything, but if we … Do you happen to have a condom?”

“You don’t have a condom?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I don’t have a condom,” I said, which seemed the most ridiculous thing ever, since in fact I had carried a condom over scorching deserts and icy slopes and across forests, mountains, and rivers, and through the most agonizing, tedious, and exhilarating days only to arrive here, in a heated luxury tent with a double bed and battery-operated candle lights, staring into the eyes of a hot, sweet, self-absorbed, brown-eyed, Michelle Shocked — loving man without that condom just because I had two palm-sized patches of mortifyingly rough skin on my hips and I’d vowed so fiercely not to take my pants off that I’d purposely left it behind in my first aid kit in my backpack in the town that was located in God-knows-what direction instead of doing the reasonable, rational, realistic thing and putting it in my little faux purse that smelled like white gasoline.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, taking both of my hands into his. “We can just hang out. There are a lot of things we can do, actually.”

And so we recommenced kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands running everywhere over my clothes, my hands running everywhere over his.

“Do you want to take your shirt off?” he whispered after a while, pulling away from me, and I laughed because I did want to take my shirt off, so then I took it off and he stood there looking at me in the black lace bra I’d packed months before because I thought when I got to Ashland I might want to wear it and I laughed again, remembering that.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Just … do you like my bra?” I waved my hands in a flourish, as if to model it. “It traveled a long way.”

“I’m glad it found its way here,” he said, and reached over and touched his finger very delicately to the edge of one of its straps, near my collarbone, but instead of pushing it down and off my shoulder as I thought he would, he ran his finger slowly along the upper edge of my bra in front and then traced it all the way down around the bottom. I watched his face while he did this. It seemed more intimate than kissing him had. By the time he’d finished outlining the whole thing, he’d barely touched me and yet I was so wet I could hardly stand up.

“Come here,” I said, pulling him to me and then down onto his bed, kicking off my sandals as we went. We were still in our jeans, but he whipped his shirt off and I undid my bra and tossed it into the corner of the tent and we kissed and rolled on top of each other at a feverish pitch until we grew languid and lay side by side kissing some more. His hands traveled all this while from my hair to my breasts to my waist and finally to unbutton the top button of my jeans, which is when I remembered about my hideous patches on my hips and rolled away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you—”

“It isn’t that. It’s … There’s something I should tell you first.”

“You’re married?”

“No,” I said, though it took me a moment to realize I was telling the truth. Paul flashed into my mind. Paul. And suddenly, I sat up. “Are you married?” I asked, turning back to Jonathan, lying on the bed behind me.

“Not married. No kids,” he replied.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-four.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

We sat contemplating this. It seemed exotic and perfect to me that he was thirty-four. Like in spite of the fact that he’d failed to ask me anything about myself, at least I was in bed with a man who wasn’t a boy anymore.

“What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and placed his hand on my naked back. When he did, I became aware that I was trembling. I wondered if he could feel that too.

“It’s something I feel self-conscious about. The skin on my hips … it’s kind of … Well, you know how last night I told you that I’m in the middle of hiking this trail called the PCT? So I have to wear my backpack all the time and where the hip belt of my pack rubs against my skin, it’s become”—I searched for a way to explain it that avoided the phrases tree bark and plucked dead chicken flesh—“roughened up. Sort of calloused from so much hiking. I just don’t want you to be shocked if …”

I trailed off, out of breath, my words absorbed entirely in the immaculate pleasure of his lips on the small of my back while his hands reached around the front to finish the task of unbuttoning my jeans. He sat up, his naked chest against me, pushing my hair aside to kiss my neck and shoulders until I turned and pulled him down onto me as I wriggled out of my pants while he kissed his way down my body from my ear to my throat to my collarbone to my breasts to my navel to the lace of my underwear, which he nudged down as he worked his way to the patches over my hip bones that I hoped he would never touch.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered, his mouth so soft against the roughest part of me. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

It was fun. It was more than fun. It was like a festival in that tent. We fell asleep at six and woke two hours later, exhausted, but awake, our bodies too out of whack to sleep any more.

“It’s my day off,” said Jonathan, sitting up. “You wanna go to the beach?”

I consented without knowing where exactly the beach might be. It was my day off too, my last one. Tomorrow I’d be back on the trail, headed for Crater Lake. We dressed and drove on a long arcing road that took us a couple of hours through the forest and up over the coastal mountains. We drank coffee and ate scones and listened to music as we drove, sticking to the same narrow conversation we’d had the night before: music, it seemed, was the one thing we had to discuss. By the time we pulled into the coastal town of Brookings, I half regretted agreeing to come and not only because my interest in Jonathan was waning, but because we’d been driving three hours. It seemed odd to be so far from the PCT, as if I were betraying it in a way.

The magnificence of the beach muted that feeling. As I walked along the ocean beside Jonathan, I realized that I’d been at this very beach before, with Paul. We’d camped in the nearby state park campground when we’d been on our long post-NYC road trip — the one on which we’d gone to the Grand Canyon and Vegas, Big Sur and San Francisco, and that had ultimately taken us to Portland. We’d stopped to camp at this beach along the way. We’d made a fire, cooked dinner, and played cards at a picnic table, then crawled into the back of my truck to make love on the futon that was there. I could feel the memory of it like a cloak on my skin. Who I’d been when I’d been here with Paul and what I’d thought would happen and what did and who I was now and how everything had changed.

Jonathan didn’t ask what I was thinking about, though I’d gone quiet. We only walked silently together, passing few people, though it was a Sunday afternoon, walking and walking until there was no one but us.

“How about here?” Jonathan asked when we came to a spot that was backed by a cove of dark boulders. I watched as he laid out a blanket, set the bag of lunch things he’d bought at Safeway on top of it, and sat down.

“I want to walk a bit farther, if you don’t mind,” I said, leaving my sandals near the blanket. It felt good to be alone, the wind in my hair, the sand soothing my feet. As I walked, I collected pretty rocks that I wouldn’t be able to take with me. When I’d gone so far that I couldn’t make out Jonathan in the distance, I bent and wrote Paul’s name in the sand.

I’d done that so many times before. I’d done it for years — every time I visited a beach after I fell in love with Paul when I was nineteen, whether we were together or not. But as I wrote his name now, I knew I was doing it for the last time. I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him. What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

“Do you want these?” I asked Jonathan when I returned to him, holding out the rocks I’d collected.

He smiled, shook his head, and watched as I let them fall back onto the sand.

I sat down beside him on the blanket, and he pulled things from the Safeway bag — bagels and cheese, a little plastic bear of honey, bananas and oranges, which he peeled for us. I ate them until he reached over with his finger full of honey, spread it on my lips, and kissed it off, biting me ever so gently at the end.

And so began a seaside honey fantasia. Him, me, the honey with some inevitable sand mixed in. My mouth, his mouth, and all the way up the tender side of my arm to my breasts. Across the broad plain of his bare shoulders and down to his nipples and navel and along the top edge of his shorts, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Wow,” I gasped because it seemed to be our word. It stood in for what I didn’t say, which was that for a guy who wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was ass-kickingly good in bed. And I hadn’t even fucked him yet.

Without a word, he took a box of condoms from the Safeway bag and ripped it open. When he stood, he reached for my hand and pulled me up too. I let him lead me across the sand to the gathering of boulders that formed a cove and we circled back into it, to what passed for private on a public beach — a cranny among the dark rocks in the broad light of day. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was into, having sex outside. I’m sure there’s a woman on the planet who’d choose the outdoors over even the most slipshod and temporary quarters, but I haven’t met her, though I decided for this day that the protection of the rocks would suffice. After all, over the course of the past couple of months, I’d done everything else outside. We took each other’s clothes off and I reclined with my bare rump against a sloped boulder, wrapping my legs around Jonathan until he turned me over and I gripped the rock. Alongside the remnants of honey, there was the mineral scent of salt and sand and the reedy scent of moss and plankton. It wasn’t long before I forgot about being outside, before I couldn’t even remember the honey, or whether he’d asked me a single question or not.

There wasn’t much to say as we made the long drive back to Ashland. I was so tired from sex and lack of sleep, from sand and sun and honey, that I could hardly speak anyway. We were quiet and peaceful together, blasting Neil Young all the way to the hostel, where, without ceremony, we ended our twenty-two-hour date.

“Thanks for everything,” I said, kissing him. It was past dark already, nine o’clock on a Sunday night, the town quieter than it had been the night before, hunkered down and settled in, half the tourists gone home.

“Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it.

I handed him the scrap of paper.

“Don’t forget your purse,” he said, picking up my little red stove bag.

“Bye,” I said, taking it from him and reaching for the door.

“Not so fast,” he said, pulling me toward him. He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

The next morning I dressed in my hiking clothes — the same old stained sports bra and threadbare navy blue hiking shorts I’d been wearing since day 1, along with a new pair of wool socks and the last fresh T-shirt I’d have all the way to the end, a heather gray shirt that said UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY in yellow letters across the chest. I walked to the co-op with Monster on my back, my ski pole dangling from my wrist, and a box in my arms, taking over a table in the deli section of the store to organize my pack.

When I was done, Monster sat tidily loaded down next to the small box that held my jeans, bra, and underwear, which I was mailing back to Lisa, and a plastic grocery bag of meals I couldn’t bear to eat any longer, which I planned to leave in the PCT hiker free box at the post office on my way out of town. Crater Lake National Park was my next stop, about 110 trail miles away. I needed to get back on the PCT and yet I was reluctant to leave Ashland. I dug through my pack, found my Strayed necklace, and put it on. I reached over and touched the raven feather Doug had given me. It was still wedged into my pack in the place I’d first put it, though it was worn and straggly now. I unzipped the side pocket where I kept my first aid kit, pulled it out, and opened it up. The condom I’d carried all the way from Mojave was still there, still like new. I took it out and put it in the plastic grocery bag with the food I didn’t want, and then I hoisted Monster onto my back and left the co-op carrying the box and the plastic grocery bag.

I hadn’t gone far when I saw the headband man I’d met up at Toad Lake, sitting on the sidewalk where I’d seen him before, his coffee can and little cardboard sign in front of him. “I’m heading out,” I said, stopping before him.

He looked up at me and nodded. He still didn’t seem to remember me — either from our encounter at Toad Lake or from a couple of days before.

“I met you when you were looking for the Rainbow Gathering,” I said. “I was there with another woman named Stacy. We talked to you.”

He nodded again, shaking the change in his can.

“I’ve got some food here that I don’t need, if you want it,” I said, setting the plastic grocery bag down beside him.

“Thanks, baby,” he said as I began to walk away.

I stopped and turned.

“Hey,” I called. “Hey!” I shouted until he looked at me.

“Don’t call me baby,” I said.

He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed his head.

16 MAZAMA

Crater Lake used to be a mountain. Mount Mazama, it was called. It was not so unlike the chain of dormant volcanoes I’d be traversing on the PCT in Oregon — Mount McLoughlin, the Three Sisters peaks, Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood — except that it was bigger than them all, having reached an elevation that’s estimated at a little under 12,000 feet. Mount Mazama blew up about 7,700 years ago in a cataclysmic eruption that was forty-two times more voluminous than the eruption that decapitated Mount St. Helens in 1980. It was the largest explosive eruption in the Cascade Range going back a million years. In the wake of Mazama’s destruction, ash and pumice blanketed the landscape for 500,000 square miles — covering nearly all of Oregon and reaching as far as Alberta, Canada. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called — a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.

I knew a little something about lakes, having come from Minnesota, but as I walked away from Ashland, I couldn’t quite imagine what I would see at Crater Lake. It would be like Lake Superior, I supposed, the lake near which my mother had died, going off blue forever into the horizon. My guidebook said only that my first view of it from the rim, which rose 900 feet above the lake’s surface, would be “one of disbelief.”

I had a new guidebook now. A new bible. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington, though back at the co-op in Ashland, I’d ripped off the last 130 of the book’s pages because I didn’t need the Washington part. My first night out of Ashland, I paged through the book before falling asleep, reading bits here and there, the same as I had with the California guidebook in the desert on my first night on the PCT.

As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again.

It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it, which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that pushed me out.

One night I stopped to camp, stripped off my sweaty clothes, dressed in every other piece of clothing I had, and quickly made dinner, zipping myself into my sleeping bag as soon as I finished eating, chilled to the bone, too cold even to read. I lay curled into myself in a fetal position with my hat and gloves on all night long, barely able to sleep. When the sun rose at last, it was 26 degrees and my tent was covered in a thin layer of snow; the water in my bottles was frozen, though they’d been beside me inside the tent. As I broke camp without a sip of water, eating a protein bar instead of my regular granola mixed with Better Than Milk, I thought again of my mother. She’d been looming for days, riding low and heavy in my mind since Ashland, and now finally, on the day of the snow, she was undeniably here.

It was August 18. Her birthday. She’d have been fifty that day, if she’d lived.

She didn’t live. She didn’t get to be fifty. She would never be fifty, I told myself as I walked under the cold and bright August sun. Be fifty, Mom. Be fucking fifty, I thought with increasing rage as I forged on. I couldn’t believe how furious I was at my mother for not being alive on her fiftieth birthday. I had the palpable urge to punch her in the mouth.

Her previous birthdays hadn’t brought up the same rage. In past years, I’d been nothing but sad. On the first birthday without her — on the day that she’d have been forty-six — I’d spread her ashes with Eddie, Karen, Leif, and Paul in the little rock-lined flowerbed we’d made for her in a clearing on our land. On her three subsequent birthdays, I’d done nothing but cry as I sat very still listening with great attention to the entire Judy Collins album Colors of the Day, its every note seeming to be one of my cells. I could bear to listen to it only once each year, for all the memories of my mother playing it when I was a child. The music made it feel like my mother was right there with me, standing in the room — only she wasn’t and would never be again.

I couldn’t allow even a line of it now on the PCT. I deleted each and every song from the mix-tape radio station in my head, pressing an imaginary rewind in a desperate scramble, forcing my mind to go static instead. It was my mother’s not-fiftieth birthday and there would be no song. Instead, I passed by high lakes and crossed over blocky volcanic rocks as the night’s snow melted on the hardy wildflowers that grew among them, hiking faster than ever while thinking uncharitable thoughts about my mother. Dying at forty-five had only been the worst thing she’d done wrong. As I hiked, I made a catalogue of the rest, listing them painstakingly in my head:

She’d gone through a phase during which she’d smoked pot on an occasional but regular basis and had no qualms about doing it in front of my siblings and me. Once, stoned, she’d said, “It’s only an herb. Like tea.”

It hadn’t been uncommon for my brother, sister, and me to be left alone when we lived in the apartment buildings full of single moms. She told us we were old enough to look after ourselves for a few hours because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. Plus, there were all those other moms we could go to if something went wrong, she said. But we needed our mom.

During this same period, when she became really mad, she often threatened to spank us with a wooden spoon, and a few times, she’d followed through.

Once she said it was perfectly okay with her if we wanted to call her by her first name instead of calling her Mom.

She could be cool and often distant with her friends. She loved them, but she kept them at arm’s length. I don’t think she truly let any one of them all the way in. She held to her belief that “blood was thicker than water,” in spite of the fact that my family was rather short of blood relations who didn’t live hundreds of miles away. She maintained an air of insularity and privacy, participating in the community of friends, but also sealing off our family from it. This was why no one had swooped in when she died, I supposed, why her friends had left me in peace in my inevitable exile. Because she had not held any of them very close, none of them held me. They wished me well, but they didn’t invite me to Thanksgiving dinner or call me up on my mom’s birthday to say hello after she died.

She was optimistic to an annoying degree, given to saying those stupid things: We’re not poor because we’re rich in love! or When one door closes, another one opens up! Which always, for a reason I couldn’t quite pin down, made me want to throttle her, even when she was dying and her optimism briefly and desolately expressed itself in the belief that in fact she wouldn’t die, so long as she drank a tremendous amount of wheatgrass juice.

When I was a senior in high school, she didn’t ask where I would like to go to college. She didn’t take me on a tour. I didn’t even know people went on tours until I went to college and others told me they’d gone on them. I was left to figure it out on my own, applying to a single college in St. Paul for no reason whatsoever other than it looked nice on the brochure and it was only a three-hour drive away from home. Yes, I had slacked a bit in high school, playing the dumb blonde so I wouldn’t be socially ostracized because my family lived in a house with a honey bucket for a toilet and a woodstove for heat; and my stepfather had long hair and a big bushy beard and drove around in a demolished car that he’d made into a pickup truck by himself with a blowtorch, a chain saw, and a few two-by-fours; and my mother opted not to shave under her arms and to say things to the red-blooded gun-loving locals like Actually, I think hunting is murder. But she knew I was secretly smart. She knew I was intellectually avid, devouring books by the day. I’d scored in the upper percentiles on every standardized test I ever took, to everyone’s surprise but hers and mine. Why hadn’t she said, Hey, maybe you should apply to Harvard? Maybe you should apply to Yale? The thought of Harvard and Yale hadn’t even crossed my mind back then. They seemed to be utterly fictitious schools. It was only later that I realized that Harvard and Yale were real. And even though the reality is they wouldn’t have let me in — I honestly wasn’t up to their standards — something inside me was smashed by the fact that there’d never even been the question that I could give them a shot.

But it was too late now, I knew, and there was only my dead, insular, overly optimistic, non-college-preparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking, wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-my-name mom to blame. She had failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me.

Fuck her, I thought, so mad that I stopped walking.

And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over, keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we’d left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.

Fuck her, I chanted as I marched on over the next few miles, my pace quickened by my rage, but soon I slowed and stopped to sit on a boulder. A gathering of low flowers grew at my feet, their barely pink petals edging the rocks. Crocus, I thought, the name coming into my mind because my mother had given it to me. These same flowers grew in the dirt where I’d spread her ashes. I reached out and touched the petals of one, feeling my anger drain out of my body.

By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who — no matter how long they lived — would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered that love her greatest achievement. It was what she banked on when she understood that she really was going to die and die soon, the thing that made it just barely okay for her to leave me and Karen and Leif behind.

“I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days.

“Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

“I’ll always be with you, no matter what,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied, rubbing her soft arm.

When she’d become sick enough that we knew she was really going to die, when we were in the homestretch to hell, when we were well past thinking any amount of wheatgrass juice would save her, I’d asked her what she wanted done with her body — cremated or buried — though she only looked at me as if I were speaking Dutch.

“I want everything that can be donated to be donated,” she said after a while. “My organs, I mean. Let them have every part they can use.”

“Okay,” I said. It was the oddest thing to contemplate, to know that we weren’t making impossibly far-off plans; to imagine parts of my mother living on in someone else’s body. “But then what?” I pressed on, practically panting with pain. I had to know. It would fall on me. “What would you like to do with … what’s … left over. Do you want to be buried or cremated?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Of course you care,” I replied.

“I really don’t care. Do what you think is best. Do whatever is cheapest.”

“No,” I insisted. “You have to tell me. I want to know what you want done.” The idea that I would be the one to decide filled me with panic.

“Oh, Cheryl,” she said, exhausted by me, our eyes meeting in a grief-stricken détente. For every time I wanted to throttle her because she was too optimistic, she wanted to throttle me because I would never ever relent.

“Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.”

And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they’d once been bones. The box that the man at the funeral home handed to me was oddly addressed to my mom. I brought it home and set it in the cupboard beneath the curio cabinet, where she kept her nicest things. It was June. It sat there until August 18, as did the tombstone we’d had made for her, which had arrived the same week as the ashes. It sat in the living room, off to the side, a disturbing sight to visitors probably, but it was a comfort to me. The stone was slate gray, the writing etched in white. It said her name and the dates of her birth and death and the sentence she’d spoken to us again and again as she got sicker and died: I’m with you always.

She wanted us to remember that, and I did. It felt like she was with me always, metaphorically at least. And in a way it was literal too. When we’d finally laid down that tombstone and spread her ashes into the dirt, I hadn’t spread them all. I’d kept a few of the largest chunks in my hand. I’d stood for a long while, not ready to release them to the earth. I didn’t release them. I never ever would.

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

By the night of my mother’s fiftieth birthday, I loved her again, though I still couldn’t bear to let the Judy Collins songs come into my head. It was cold, but not as cold as the night before. I sat bundled in my tent wearing my gloves, reading the first pages of my new book—The Best American Essays 1991. I usually waited until morning to burn whatever pages I’d read the night before, but on this night, when I was done reading, I crawled out of my tent and made a fire of the pages I’d read. As I watched them ignite, I said my mother’s name out loud as if it were a ceremony for her. Her name was Barbara, but she’d gone by Bobbi, so that was the name I spoke. Saying Bobbi instead of Mom felt like a revelation, like it was the first time that I truly understood that she was my mother, but also more. When she’d died, I’d lost that too — the Bobbi she’d been, the woman who was separate from who she was to me. She seemed to come at me now, the full perfect and imperfect force of her humanity, as if her life was an intricately painted mural and I could finally see the whole thing. Who she’d been to me and who she hadn’t. How it was she belonged to me profoundly, and also how she didn’t.

Bobbi hadn’t been granted her last wish, that her organs be used to help others, or at least not to the extent that she had hoped. When she died, she was ravaged with cancer and morphine, her forty-five-year-old body a toxic thing. In the end, they could use only her corneas. I knew that part of the eye was nothing but a transparent membrane, but when I thought of what my mother had given, I didn’t think of it that way. I thought of her astounding blue, blue eyes living on in someone else’s face. A few months after my mom died, we’d received a thank-you letter from the foundation that facilitated the donation. Because of her generosity someone could see, the letter said. I was mad with desire to meet the person, to gaze into his or her eyes. He or she wouldn’t have to say a word. All I wanted was for whoever it was to look at me. I called the number on the letter to inquire, but was quickly brushed aside. Confidentiality was of the utmost importance, I was told. There were the recipient’s rights.

“I’d like to explain to you about the nature of your mother’s donation,” the woman on the phone said in a patient and consoling voice that reminded me of any number of the grief counselors, hospice volunteers, nurses, doctors, and morticians who had addressed me in the weeks during which my mother was dying and in the days after she died — a voice full of intentional, almost overstated compassion, which also communicated that in this, I was entirely alone. “It wasn’t the entire eye that was transplanted,” the woman explained, “but rather the cornea, which is—”

“I know what the cornea is,” I snapped. “I’d still like to know who this person is. To see him or her if I can. I think you owe me that.”

I hung up the phone overcome with grief, but the small reasonable core that still lived inside of me knew that the woman was right. My mother wasn’t there. Her blue eyes were gone. I’d never gaze into them again.

When the flames from the pages I’d burned had gone out and I’d stood to return to my tent, the sound of high and frenzied barks and howls came to me from the east — a pack of coyotes. I’d heard that sound in northern Minnesota so many times it didn’t scare me. It reminded me of home. I looked up at the sky, the stars everywhere and magnificent, so bright against the dark. I shivered, knowing I was lucky to be here, feeling that it was too beautiful to go back into my tent just yet. Where would I be in a month? It seemed impossible that I wouldn’t be on the trail, but it was true. Most likely I’d be in Portland, if for no other reason than that I was flat broke. I still had a small bit of money left over from Ashland, but nothing that wouldn’t be gone by the time I reached the Bridge of the Gods.

I let Portland roll around in my mind through the days, as I passed out of the Sky Lakes Wilderness into the Oregon Desert — a high dusty flat plain of lodgepole pines that my guidebook explained had been smattered with lakes and streams before they were buried beneath the tons of pumice and ash that had fallen on them when Mount Mazama erupted. It was early on a Saturday when I reached Crater Lake National Park. The lake was nowhere in sight. I’d arrived instead at the campground seven miles south of the lake’s rim.

The campground wasn’t just a campground. It was a mad tourist complex that included a parking lot, a store, a motel, a little coin laundromat, and what seemed to be three hundred people revving their engines and playing their radios loud, slurping beverages from gigantic paper cups with straws and eating from big bags of chips they bought in the store. The scene both riveted and appalled me. If I hadn’t known it firsthand, I wouldn’t have believed that I could walk a quarter mile in any direction and be in an entirely different world. I camped there for the night, showering blissfully in the bathhouse, and the next morning made my way to Crater Lake.

My guidebook had been correct: my first sight of it was one of disbelief. The surface of the water sat 900 feet below where I stood on the rocky 7,100-foot-high rim. The jagged circle of the lake spread out beneath me in the most unspeakably pure ultramarine blue I’d ever seen. It was approximately six miles across, its blue interrupted only by the top of a small volcano, Wizard Island, that rose 700 feet above the water, forming a conical island upon which twisted foxtail pines grew. The mostly barren, undulating rim that surrounded the lake was dotted with these same pines and backed by distant mountains.

“Because the lake is so pure and deep, it absorbs every color of visible light except blue, so it reflects pure blue back to us,” said a stranger who stood beside me, answering the question I’d nearly uttered out loud in my amazement.

“Thanks,” I said to her. Because the water was so deep and pure it absorbed every color of visible light except blue seemed like a perfectly sound and scientific explanation, and yet there was still something about Crater Lake that remained inexplicable. The Klamath tribe still considered the lake a sacred site and I could see why. I wasn’t a skeptic about this. It didn’t matter that all around me there were tourists taking pictures and driving slowly past in their cars. I could feel the lake’s power. It seemed a shock in the midst of this great land: inviolable, separate and alone, as if it had always been and would always be here, absorbing every color of visible light but blue.

I took a few photographs and walked along the lake’s rim near a small gathering of buildings that had been built to accommodate tourists. I had no choice but to spend the day because it was a Sunday and the park’s post office was closed; I couldn’t get my box until tomorrow. It was sunny and finally warm again, and as I walked, I thought that if I’d continued with the pregnancy I’d learned about in that motel room in Sioux Falls the night before I decided to hike the PCT, I’d be giving birth to a baby right about now. The week of my mother’s birthday would’ve been my due date. The crushing coalescence of those dates felt like a punch in the gut at the time, but it didn’t compel me to waver in my decision to end my pregnancy. It only made me beg the universe to give me another chance. To let me become who I needed to before I became a mother: a woman whose life was profoundly different than my mother’s had been.

Much as I loved and admired my mother, I’d spent my childhood planning not to become her. I knew why she’d married my father at nineteen, pregnant and only a tiny bit in love. It was one of the stories I’d made her tell when I’d asked and asked and she’d shaken her head and said, Why do you want to know? I’d asked so much that she finally gave in. When she’d learned she was pregnant, she’d pondered two options: an illegal abortion in Denver or hiding out in a distant city during her pregnancy, then handing over my sister to her mother, who’d offered to raise the baby as her own. But my mother hadn’t done either of those things. She decided to have her baby, so she’d married my dad instead. She’d become Karen’s mother and then mine and then Leif’s.

Ours.

“I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.”

“Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand.

I was too young to say anything else.

At noon I went to the cafeteria in one of the nearby buildings and ate lunch. Afterwards, I walked through the parking lot to the Crater Lake Lodge and strolled through the elegantly rustic lobby with Monster on my back, pausing to peer into the dining room. There was a smattering of people sitting at tables, handsome groups holding glasses of chardonnay and pinot gris like pale yellow jewels. I went outside to the long porch that overlooked the lake, made my way along a line of grand rocking chairs, and found one that was set off by itself.

I sat in it for the rest of the afternoon, staring at the lake. I still had 334 miles to hike before I reached the Bridge of the Gods, but something made me feel as if I’d arrived. Like that blue water was telling me something I’d walked all this way to know.

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.

17 INTO A PRIMAL GEAR

Oregon was a hopscotch in my mind. I skipped it, spun it, leapt it in my imagination all the way from Crater Lake to the Bridge of the Gods. Eighty-five miles to my next box at a place called Shelter Cove Resort. One hundred and forty-three miles beyond that to my final box at Olallie Lake. Then I’d be on the homestretch to the Columbia River: 106 miles to the town of Cascade Locks, with a stop for a holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-I’m-almost-there drink at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood at the midpoint of that final stretch.

But that still added up to 334 miles to hike.

The good thing, I quickly understood, was that no matter what happened in those 334 miles, there would be fresh berries along the way. Huckleberries and blueberries, salmonberries and blackberries, all of them plump for the picking for miles along the trail. I raked the bushes with my hands as I walked, sometimes stopping to fill my hat, as I made my way leisurely through the Mount Thielsen and Diamond Peak Wildernesses.

It was cold. It was hot. The tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips grew another layer. My feet stopped bleeding and blistering, but they still hurt like hell. I hiked a few half days, going only seven or eight miles in an effort to alleviate the pain, but it did little good. They hurt deep. Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at day’s end I was still pretty much shattered.

The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy.

There were pleasant mornings and lovely swaths of afternoon, ten-mile stretches that I’d glide right over while barely feeling a thing. I loved getting lost in the rhythm of my steps and the click of my ski pole against the trail; the silence and the songs and sentences in my head. I loved the mountains and the rocks and the deer and rabbits that bolted off into the trees and the beetles and frogs that scrambled across the trail. But there would always come the point in each day when I didn’t love it anymore, when it was monotonous and hard and my mind shifted into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step, and I stopped and made camp and efficiently did all the tasks that making camp required, all in an effort to get as quickly as possible to the blessed moment when I could collapse, utterly demolished, in my tent.

That’s how I felt by the time I dragged into the Shelter Cove Resort: spent and bored with the trail, empty of every single thing except gratitude I was there. I’d hopped another of my squares in the Oregon hopscotch. Shelter Cove Resort was a store surrounded by a rustic set of cabins on a wide green lawn that sat on the shore of a big lake called Odell that was rimmed by green forests. I stepped onto the porch of the store and went inside. There were short rows of snacks and fishing lures and a cooler with drinks inside. I found a bottle of Snapple lemonade, got a bag of chips, and walked to the counter.

“You a PCT hiker?” the man who stood behind the cash register asked me. When I nodded, he gestured to a window at the back of the store. “The post office is closed until tomorrow morning, but you can camp for free at a spot we’ve got nearby. And there are showers that’ll cost you a buck.”

I had only ten dollars left — as I’d now come to expect, my stops in Ashland and Crater Lake National Park had been pricier than I’d imagined they’d be — but I knew I had twenty dollars in the box I’d get the next morning, so when I handed the man my money to pay for the drink and the chips, I asked him for some quarters for the shower.

Outside, I cracked open the lemonade and chips and ate them as I made my way toward the little wooden bathhouse the man had pointed out, my anticipation tremendous. When I stepped inside, I was pleased to see that it was a one-person affair. I locked the door behind me, and it was my own domain. I’d have slept inside it if they’d let me. I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the scratched-up mirror. It wasn’t only my feet that had been destroyed by the trail, but it seemed my hair had been too — made coarser and strangely doubled in thickness, sprung alive by layers of dried sweat and trail dust, as if I were slowly but surely turning into a cross between Farrah Fawcett in her glory days and Gunga Din at his worst.

I put my coins in the little coin box, stepped into the shower, and luxuriated under the hot water, scrubbing myself with the sliver of soap someone had left there until it dissolved completely in my hands. Afterwards, I dried off with the same bandanna I used to wash my cooking pot and spoon with lake and creek water and dressed again in my dirty clothes. I hoisted Monster on and walked back to the store feeling a thousand times better. There was a wide porch in front with a long bench that ran along its sides. I sat down on it and looked out at Odell Lake while brushing my wet hair with my fingers. Olallie Lake and then Timberline Lodge and then Cascade Locks, I was thinking.

Skip, hop, spin, done.

“Are you Cheryl?” a man asked as he came out of the store. Within a moment, two other men had stepped out behind him. I knew immediately by their sweat-stained T-shirts they were PCT hikers, though they didn’t have their packs. They were young and handsome, bearded and tan and dirty, equal parts incredibly muscular and incredibly thin. One was tall. One was blond. One had intense eyes.

I was so very glad I’d taken that shower.

“Yes,” I said.

“We’ve been following you a long way,” said the blond one, a smile blooming across his thin face.

“We knew we were going to catch you today,” said the one with the intense eyes. “We saw your tracks on the trail.”

“We’ve been reading your notes in the trail register,” added the tall one.

“We were trying to figure out how old you’d be,” said the blond one.

“How old did you think I’d be?” I asked, smiling like a maniac.

“We thought either about our age or fifty,” said the one with the intense eyes.

“I hope you’re not disappointed,” I said, and we laughed and blushed.

They were Rick, Josh, and Richie, all of them three or four years younger than me. They were from Portland, Eugene, and New Orleans, respectively. They’d all gone to college together at an insular Minnesota liberal arts school an hour outside the Twin Cities.

“I’m from Minnesota!” I exclaimed when they told me, but they knew that already, from my notes in the trail register.

“You don’t have a trail name yet?” one of them asked me.

“Not that I know of,” I said.

They had a trail name: the Three Young Bucks, which they’d been given by other hikers in southern California, they told me. The name fit. They were three young and buckish men. They’d come all the way from the Mexican border. They hadn’t skipped the snow like everyone else. They’d hiked over it, right through it — regardless of the fact that it was a record snow year — and because they’d done so, they were at the back of the Mexico-to-Canada thru-hiker pack, which is how, at this late date, they’d met me. They hadn’t met Tom, Doug, Greg, Matt, Albert, Brent, Stacy, Trina, Rex, Sam, Helen, John, or Sarah. They hadn’t even stopped in Ashland. They hadn’t danced to the Dead or eaten chewable opium or had sex with anyone pressed up against a rock on a beach. They’d just plowed right on through, hiking twenty-some miles a day, gaining on me since the moment I’d leapfrogged north of them when I’d bypassed to Sierra City. They weren’t just three young bucks. They were three young extraordinary hiking machines.

Being in their company felt like a holiday.

We walked to the campsite the store set aside for us, where the Three Young Bucks had already ditched their packs, and we cooked dinner and talked and told stories about things both on and off the trail. I liked them immensely. We clicked. They were sweet, cute, funny, kind guys and they made me forget how ruined I’d felt just an hour before. In their honor, I made the freeze-dried raspberry cobbler I’d been carrying for weeks, saving it for a special occasion. When it was done, we ate it with four spoons from my pot and then slept in a row under the stars.

In the morning, we collected our boxes and took them back to our camp to reorganize our packs before heading on. I opened my box and pushed my hands through the smooth ziplock bags of food, feeling for the envelope that would contain my twenty-dollar bill. It had become such a familiar thrill for me now, that envelope with the money inside, but this time I couldn’t find it. I dumped everything out and ran my fingers along the folds inside the box, searching for it, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t know why. It just wasn’t. I had six dollars and twelve cents.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” asked one of the Young Bucks.

“Nothing,” I said. It was embarrassing to me that I was constantly broke, that no one was standing invisibly behind me with a credit card or a bank account.

I loaded my food into my old blue bag, sick with the knowledge that I’d have to hike 143 miles to my next box with only six dollars and twelve cents in my pocket. At least I didn’t need money where I was going, I reasoned, in order to calm myself. I was heading through the heart of Oregon — over Willamette Pass and McKenzie Pass and Santiam Pass, through the Three Sisters and Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson Wildernesses — and there’d be no place to spend my six dollars and twelve cents anyway, right?

I hiked out an hour later with the Three Young Bucks, crisscrossing with them all day; occasionally we stopped together for breaks. I was amazed by what they ate and how they ate it. They were like barbarians loose upon the land, shoving three Snickers bars apiece into their mouths on a single fifteen-minute break, though they were thin as sticks. When they took off their shirts, their ribs showed right through. I’d lost weight too, but not as much as the men — an unjust pattern I’d observed across the board in the other male and female hikers I’d met that summer as well — but I didn’t much care anymore whether I was fat or thin. I cared only about getting more food. I was a barbarian too, my hunger voracious and monumental. I’d reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn’t have.

I said goodbye to the Three Young Bucks that afternoon. They were going to push on a few miles past where I planned to camp because in addition to being three young incredible hiking machines, they were eager to reach Santiam Pass, where they’d be getting off the trail for a few days to visit friends and family. While they were living it up, showering and sleeping in actual beds and eating foods I didn’t even want to imagine, I’d get ahead of them again and they’d once more be following my tracks.

“Catch me if you can,” I said, hoping they would, sad to part ways with them so soon. I camped alone near a pond that evening still aglow from having met them, thinking about the stories they’d told me, as I massaged my feet after dinner. Another one of my blackened toenails was separating from my toe. I gave it a tug and it came all the way off. I tossed it into the grass.

Now the PCT and I were tied. The score was 5–5.

I sat in my tent with my feet propped up on my food bag, reading the book I’d gotten in my box — Maria Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand Things—until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I turned off my headlamp and lay in the dark. As I dozed off, I heard an owl in a tree directly overhead. Who-whoo, who-whoo, it hooted with a call that was at once so strong and so gentle that I woke up.

“Who-whoo,” I called back to it, and the owl was silent.

“Who-whoo,” I tried again.

“Who-whoo,” it replied.

I hiked into the Three Sisters Wilderness, named for the South, North, and Middle Sister mountains in its boundaries. Each of the Sister peaks was more than 10,000 feet high, the third-, fourth-, and fifth-highest peaks in Oregon. They were the crown jewels among a relatively close gathering of volcanic peaks I’d be passing in the coming week, but I couldn’t see them yet as I approached from the south on the PCT, singing songs and reciting scraps of poems in my head as I hiked through a tall forest of Douglas firs, white pines, and mountain hemlocks, past lakes and ponds.

A couple of days after I’d said goodbye to the Three Young Bucks, I took a detour a mile off the trail to the Elk Lake Resort, a place mentioned in my guidebook. It was a little lakeside store that catered to fishermen, much like the Shelter Cove Resort, only it had a café that served burgers. I hadn’t planned to make the detour, but when I reached the trail junction on the PCT, my endless hunger won out. I arrived just before eleven in the morning. I was the only person in the place aside from the man who worked there. I scanned the menu, did the math, and ordered a cheeseburger and fries and a small Coke; then I sat eating them in a rapture, backed by walls lined with fishing lures. My bill was six dollars and ten cents. For the first time in my entire life, I couldn’t leave a tip. To leave the two pennies I had left would’ve seemed an insult. I pulled out a little rectangle of stamps I had in the ziplock bag that held my driver’s license and placed it near my plate.

“I’m sorry — I don’t have anything extra, but I left you something else,” I said, too embarrassed to say what it was.

The man only shook his head and murmured something I couldn’t make out.

I walked down to the empty little beach along Elk Lake with the two pennies in my hand, wondering if I should toss them into the water and make a wish. I decided against it and put them in my shorts pocket, just in case I needed two cents between now and the Olallie Lake ranger station, which was still a sobering hundred miles away. Having nothing more than those two pennies was both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line between this and that — between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn’t calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been here, eighty-some days out on the PCT, broke, but okay — getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn’t afford to do it.

I hiked on, ascending to a 6,500-foot viewpoint from which I could see the peaks to the north and east: Bachelor Butte and glaciated Broken Top and — highest of them all — South Sister, which rose to 10,358 feet. My guidebook told me that it was the youngest, tallest, and most symmetrical of the Three Sisters. It was composed of over two dozen different kinds of volcanic rock, but it all looked like one reddish-brown mountain to me, its upper slopes laced with snow. As I hiked into the day, the air shifted and warmed again and I felt as if I were back in California, with the heat and the way the vistas opened up for miles across the rocky and green land.

Now that I was officially among the Three Sisters, I didn’t have the trail to myself anymore. On the high rocky meadows I passed day hikers and short-term backpackers and a Boy Scout troop out for an overnight. I stopped to talk to some of them. Do you have a gun? Are you afraid? they asked in an echo of what I’d been hearing all summer. No, no, I said, laughing a little. I met a pair of men my age who’d served in Iraq during Desert Storm and were still in the army, both of them captains. They were clean-cut, strapping, and handsome, seemingly straight off a recruitment poster. We took a long afternoon break together near a creek, into which they’d placed two cans of beer to cool. It was their last night out on a five-day trip. They’d hauled those two cans the whole time so they could drink them on the final night to celebrate.

They wanted to know everything about my trip. How it felt to walk all those days; the things I’d seen and the people I’d met and what in the hell had happened to my feet. They insisted on lifting my pack and were stupefied to find that it was heavier than either of theirs. They got ready to hike away and I wished them well, still lounging in the sun on the creek’s bank.

“Hey, Cheryl,” one of them turned to holler once he was almost out of sight on the trail. “We left one of the beers for you in the creek. We did it this way so you can’t say no. We want you to have it ’cause you’re tougher than us.”

I laughed and thanked them and went down to the creek to retrieve it, feeling flattered and lifted. I drank the beer that night near Obsidian Falls, which was named for the jet-black glass shards that wondrously cover the trail, making each step an ever-shifting clatter beneath me, as if I were walking across layers upon layers of broken china.

I was less wonder-struck the next day as I walked over McKenzie Pass into the Mount Washington Wilderness, and the trail became rockier still as I crossed the basalt flows of Belknap Crater and Little Belknap. These weren’t pretty shiny shards of rock among spring green meadows. Now I was walking over a five-mile swath of black volcanic rocks that ranged in size from baseball to soccer ball, my ankles and knees constantly twisting. The landscape was exposed and desolate, the sun searing relentlessly down on me as I struggled along in the direction of Mount Washington. When I made it to the other side of the craters, I walked gratefully among the trees and realized the crowds had disappeared. I was alone again, just the trail and me.

The following day I hiked over Santiam Pass and crossed into the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, named for the dark and stately summit to my north. I hiked past the rocky multipeaked Three Fingered Jack, which rose like a fractured hand into the sky, and continued hiking into the evening as the sun disappeared behind a blanket of clouds and a thick mist slowly enveloped me. The day had been hot, but within thirty minutes the temperature dropped 20 degrees as the wind picked up and then suddenly stilled. I walked as quickly as I could up the trail, the sweat dripping from my body in spite of the chill, searching for a place to camp. It was precariously close to dark, but there was no place flat or clear enough to pitch my tent. By the time I found a spot near a small pond, it was as if I were inside a cloud, the air eerily still and silent. In the time it took me to pitch my tent and filter a bottle of water with my insufferably slow water purifier, the wind started up again in great violent gasps, whipping the branches of the trees overhead. I’d never been in a mountain storm. I’m not afraid, I reminded myself as I crawled into my tent without eating dinner, feeling too vulnerable outside, though I knew my tent offered little protection. I sat in expectant wonder and fear, bracing for a mighty storm that never came.

An hour after dark, the air went still again and I heard coyotes yipping in the distance, as if they were celebrating the fact that the coast was clear. August had turned to September; the temperatures at night were almost always bitingly cold. I got out of my tent to pee, wearing my hat and gloves. When I scanned the trees with my headlamp, they caught on something, and I froze as the reflection of two bright pairs of eyes gazed back at me.

I never found out whose they were. An instant later they were gone.

The next day was hot and sunny, as if the strange storm the night before had been only a dream. I missed a fork in the trail and later discovered that I was no longer on the PCT but on the Oregon Skyline Trail, which paralleled the PCT roughly a mile to the west. It was an alternate route my guidebook detailed adequately, so I continued on, unworried. The trail would lead back to the PCT the next day. The day after that I’d be at Olallie Lake.

Hop, skip, jump, done.

I walked in a dense forest all afternoon, once rounding a bend to come upon a trio of enormous elks, who ran into the trees with a thunderous clamor of hooves. That evening, only moments after I stopped to make camp near a trailside pond, two bow hunters appeared, walking southbound down the trail.

“You got any water?” one of them burst out immediately.

“We can’t drink the pond water, can we?” asked the other, the desperation apparent on his face.

They both looked to be in their midthirties. One man was sandy-haired and wiry, though he had a little belly; the other was a redhead tall and meaty enough to be a linebacker. They both wore jeans with big buck knives hitched onto their belts and enormous backpacks that had bows and arrows slung across them.

“You can drink the pond water, but you need to filter it first,” I said.

“We don’t have a filter,” said the sandy-haired man, taking his pack off and setting it near a boulder that sat in the small clear area between the pond and the trail where I’d planned to camp. I’d only just set down my own pack when they’d appeared.

“You can use mine, if you’d like,” I said. I unzipped Monster’s pocket, took out my water purifier, and handed it to the sandy-haired man, who took it, walked to the mucky shore of the pond, and squatted down.

“How do you use this thing?” he called to me.

I showed him how to put the intake tube in the water with the float and how to pump the handle against the cartridge. “You’ll need your water bottle,” I added, but he and his big red-haired friend looked at each other regretfully and told me they didn’t have one. They were only up for the day hunting. Their truck was parked on a forest road about three miles away, down a side trail I’d recently crossed. They thought they’d have reached it by now.

“Have you gone all day without drinking?” I asked.

“We brought Pepsi,” the sandy-haired man answered. “We each had a six-pack.”

“We’re headed down to our truck after this, so we only need enough water to get us another bit, but we’re both dying of thirst,” the red-haired man said.

“Here,” I said, going to my pack to pull out the water I had left — about a quarter of one of my bottles. I handed it to the red-haired man and he took a long sip and handed it to his friend, who drank the rest. I felt sorry for them, but I was sorrier that they were here with me. I was exhausted. I ached to take off my boots and change out of my sweaty clothes, pitch my tent, and make my dinner so I could lose myself in The Ten Thousand Things. Plus, I got a funny feeling from these men, with their Pepsi and their bows and their big buck knives and the way they’d stormed right up to me. Something that gave me the kind of pause I’d felt way back in that first week on the trail, when I’d been sitting in Frank’s truck and I thought that perhaps he meant me harm, only to have him pull out licorice instead. I let my mind settle on that licorice.

“We’ve got the empty Pepsi cans,” said the red-haired man. “We can pump water into your bottle and then pour it into two of those.”

The sandy-haired man squatted at the pond’s shore with my empty water bottle and my purifier, and the red-haired man took his pack off and dug through it to get a couple of empty Pepsi cans. I stood watching them with my arms wrapped around myself, growing more chilled by the minute. The wet backs of my shorts and T-shirt and bra were now icy cold against my skin.

“It’s really hard to pump,” the sandy-haired man said after a while.

“You have to give it some muscle,” I said. “That’s just how my filter is.”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing coming out.”

I went to him and saw that the float was all the way up near the cartridge and the open end of the intake tube had sunk into the muck at the shallow bottom of the pond. I took the purifier from him, pulled the tube up into the clear water, and tried to pump. It was entirely locked, jammed solid with muck.

“You weren’t supposed to let the tube go into the mud like that,” I said. “You were supposed to keep it up in the water.”

“Shit,” he said without apology.

“What are we going to do?” his friend asked. “I’ve got to get something to drink.”

I went to my pack, took out my first aid kit, and pulled out the little bottle of iodine pills I carried. I hadn’t used them since I was at that frog-ridden reservoir on Hat Creek Rim and half out of my head with dehydration myself.

“We can use these,” I said, grimly understanding that I’d be drinking iodine water until I managed to repair my purifier, if it was even repairable.

“What are they?” asked the sandy-haired man.

“Iodine. You put them in and wait thirty minutes and then the water is safe to drink.” I went to the lake and submerged my two bottles in the clearest-looking spot I could reach and put iodine pills in each of them, the men followed suit with their Pepsi cans, and I put a pill in each.

“Okay,” I said, looking at my watch. “The water will be good to go at seven ten.” I hoped that with that they’d hike away, but they only sat down, settling in.

“So what are you doing out here all by yourself?” asked the sandy-haired man.

“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like the way he was looking me, openly appraising my body.

“All by yourself?”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly, equal parts leery of telling the truth and afraid to concoct a lie that would only make me feel more jangled than I suddenly did.

“I can’t believe a girl like you would be all alone up here. You’re way too pretty to be out here alone, if you ask me. How long of a trip are you on?” he asked.

“A longish one,” I answered.

“I don’t believe that a young thing like her could be out here by herself, do you?” he said to his red-haired friend, as if I weren’t even there.

“No,” I said before the red-haired man could answer him. “Anyone can do it. I mean, it’s just—”

“I wouldn’t let you come out here if you were my girlfriend, that’s for shit shock sure,” the red-headed man said.

“She’s got a really nice figure, don’t she?” the sandy-haired man said. “Healthy, with some soft curves. Just the kind I like.”

I made a complacent little sound, a sort of half laugh, though my throat was clotted suddenly with fear. “Well, nice to meet you guys,” I said, moving toward Monster. “I’m hiking on a bit farther,” I lied, “so I’d better get going.”

“We’re heading out too. We don’t want to run out of light,” said the red-haired man, pulling on his pack, and the sandy-haired man did too. I watched them in a fake posture of readying myself to leave, though I didn’t want to have to leave. I was tired and thirsty, hungry and chilled. It was heading toward dark and I’d chosen to camp on this pond because my guidebook — which only loosely described this section of the trail because it was not in fact the PCT — implied that this was the last place for a stretch where it was possible to pitch a tent.

When they left, I stood for a while, letting the knot in my throat unclench. I was fine. I was in the clear. I was being a little bit silly. They’d been obnoxious and sexist and they’d ruined my water purifier, but they hadn’t done anything to me. They hadn’t meant harm. Some guys just didn’t know any better. I dumped the things out of my pack, filled my cooking pot with pond water, lit my stove, and set the water to boil. I peeled off my sweaty clothes, pulled out my red fleece leggings and long-sleeved shirt, and dressed in them. I laid out my tarp and was shaking my tent out of its bag when the sandy-haired man reappeared. At the sight of him I knew that everything I’d felt before was correct. That I’d had a reason to be afraid. That he’d come back for me.

“What’s going on?” I asked in a falsely relaxed tone, though the sight of him there without his friend terrified me. It was as if I’d finally come across a mountain lion and I’d remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear.

“I thought you were heading on,” he said.

“I changed my mind,” I said.

“You tried to trick us.”

“No, I didn’t. I just changed my—”

“You changed your clothes too,” he said suggestively, and his words expanded in my gut like a spray of gunshot. My entire body flushed with the knowledge that when I’d taken off my clothes, he’d been nearby, watching me.

“I like your pants,” he said with a little smirk. He took off his backpack and set it down. “Or leggings, if that’s what they’re called.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said numbly, though I could hardly hear my own words for what felt like a great clanging in my head, which was the realization that my whole hike on the PCT could come to this. That no matter how tough or strong or brave I’d been, how comfortable I’d come to be with being alone, I’d also been lucky, and that if my luck ran out now, it would be as if nothing before it had ever existed, that this one evening would annihilate all those brave days.

“I’m talking about liking your pants,” the man said with a touch of irritation. “They look good on you. They show off your hips and legs.”

“Please don’t say that,” I said as unfalteringly as I could.

“What? I’m complimenting you! Can’t a guy give a girl a compliment anymore? You should be flattered.”

“Thank you,” I said in an attempt to pacify him, hating myself for it. My mind went to the Three Young Bucks, who perhaps weren’t even back on the trail yet. It went to the world’s loudest whistle that no one but the red-haired man would hear. It went to the Swiss army knife too far away in the upper-left-side pocket of my pack. It went to the not-yet-boiling water in the handleless pot on my little stove. And then it landed on the arrows that rose from the top of the sandy-haired man’s pack. I could feel the invisible line between those arrows and me like a hot thread. If he tried to do anything to me, I’d get to one of those arrows and stab him in the throat.

“I think you’d better get going,” I said evenly. “It’ll be getting dark soon.” I crossed my arms hard against my chest, acutely aware of the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra.

“It’s a free country,” he said. “I’ll go when I’m ready. I got a right, you know.” He picked up his Pepsi can and gently swirled around the water inside.

“What the hell are you doing?” a man’s voice called, and a moment later the red-haired man appeared. “I had to hike all the way back up here to find you. I thought you got lost.” He looked at me accusingly, as if I were to blame, as if I’d conspired with the sandy-haired man to get him to stay. “We got to go now if we’re going to make it back to the truck before dark.”

“You be careful out here,” the sandy-haired man said to me, pulling on his pack.

“Bye,” I said very quietly, wanting neither to answer him nor to rile him by not answering.

“Hey. It’s seven ten,” he said. “It’s safe to drink the water now.” He lifted his Pepsi can in my direction and made a toast. “Here’s to a young girl all alone in the woods,” he said, and took a sip and then turned to follow his friend down the trail.

I stood for a while the way I had the first time they left, letting all the knots of fear unclench. Nothing had happened, I told myself. I am perfectly okay. He was just a creepy, horny, not-nice man, and now he’s gone.

But then I shoved my tent back into my pack, turned off my stove, dumped the almost-boiling water out into the grass, and swished the pot in the pond so it cooled. I took a swig of my iodine water and crammed my water bottle and my damp T-shirt, bra, and shorts back into my pack. I lifted Monster, buckled it on, stepped onto the trail, and started walking northward in the fading light. I walked and I walked, my mind shifting into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion, and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step.

And then I ran.

18 QUEEN OF THE PCT

It was raining when I woke as the light seeped into the sky the next morning. I was lying in my tent in the shallow trough of the trail, its two-foot width the only flat spot I could find in the dark the night before. It had begun to rain at midnight, it had rained all night long, and as I walked through the morning, the rain came and went. I thought about what had happened with the men, or almost happened or was never really going to happen, playing it over in my mind, feeling sick and shaky, but by noon it was behind me and I was back on the PCT — the detour I’d inadvertently taken having wended its way up to the trail.

Water fell from the sky and dripped from the branches, streaming down the gully of the trail. I walked beneath the enormous trees, the forest canopy high above me, the bushes and low-growing plants that edged the trail soaking me as I brushed past. Wet and miserable as it was, the forest was magical — Gothic in its green grandiosity, both luminous and dark, so lavish in its fecundity that it looked surreal, as if I were walking through a fairy tale rather than the actual world.

It rained and rained and rained off and on through that day and all through the next. It was still raining in the early evening, when I reached the shores of the 240-acre Olallie Lake. I walked past the closed ranger station feeling a deep sense of relief, clomping over the mud and wet grass through a small cluster of picnic tables to the little collection of dark wooden buildings that constituted the Olallie Lake Resort. Until I’d hiked through Oregon, I’d had a profoundly different idea of what the word resort might suggest. No one was in sight. The ten primitive cabins scattered near the lake’s shore all looked empty, and the tiny store amid the cabins was closed for the night.

It began to rain again as I stood under a lodgepole pine near the store. I pulled the hood of my raincoat up over my head and looked at the lake. The grand peak of Mount Jefferson supposedly loomed to the south and the squat rise of Olallie Butte sat to the north, but I couldn’t see either of them, obscured as they were by the growing dark and the fog. Without the mountain views, the pines and wide lake reminded me of the northwoods of Minnesota. The air felt like Minnesota too. It was a week past Labor Day; autumn hadn’t arrived yet, but it was close. Everything felt abandoned and forlorn. I dug inside my raincoat, pulled out the pages of my guidebook, and read about a place to camp nearby — a site beyond the ranger station that overlooked Head Lake, Olallie’s much smaller neighbor.

I made camp there and cooked my dinner in the rain, then crawled into my tent and lay in my damp sleeping bag, dressed in my damp clothes. The batteries of my headlamp had gone dead, so I couldn’t read. Instead, I lay listening to the spatter of raindrops against the taut nylon a few feet from my head.

There would be fresh batteries in my box tomorrow. There would be Hershey’s chocolate kisses that I’d dole out to myself over the next week. There would be the last batch of dehydrated meals and bags of nuts and seeds that had gone stale. The thought of these things was both a torture and a comfort to me. I curled into myself, trying to keep my sleeping bag away from the edges of my tent in case it leaked, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Dismal as it was, I felt a spark of light travel through me that had everything to do with the fact that I’d be done hiking the trail in about a week. I’d be in Portland, living like a normal person again. I’d get a job waiting tables in the evenings and I’d write during the day. Ever since the idea of living in Portland had settled in my mind, I’d spent hours imagining how it would feel to be back in the world where food and music, wine and coffee could be had.

Of course, heroin could be had there too, I thought. But the thing was, I didn’t want it. Maybe I never really had. I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.

“I’ve got a box,” I called to the ranger the next morning, chasing him as he began to drive away in his truck.

He stopped and rolled down his window. “You Cheryl?”

I nodded. “I have a box,” I repeated, still buried inside my putrid rain gear.

“Your friends told me about you,” he said as he got out of his truck. “The married couple.”

I blinked and pushed my hood off. “Sam and Helen?” I asked, and the ranger nodded. The thought of them sent a surge of tenderness through me. I pulled the hood back up over my head as I followed the ranger into the garage that was connected to the ranger station, which was connected to what appeared to be his living quarters.

“I’m going to town, but I’ll be back later this afternoon, if you need anything,” he said, and handed me my box and three letters. He was brown-haired and mustached, late thirties, I guessed.

“Thanks,” I said, hugging the box and letters.

It was still raining and wretched outside, so I walked to the little store, where I bought a cup of coffee from the old man who worked the cash register on the promise I’d pay for it once I opened my box. I sat drinking it in a chair by the woodstove and read my letters. The first was from Aimee, the second from Paul, the third — much to my surprise — from Ed, the trail angel I’d met way back in Kennedy Meadows. If you get this, it means you’ve made it, Cheryl. Congrats! he wrote. I was so touched to read his words that I laughed out loud, and the old man by the cash register looked up.

“Good news from home?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

I opened my box and found not only the envelope that held my twenty dollars, but another envelope that held another twenty dollars — the one that was meant to have been in my box at the Shelter Cove Resort, which I must have mispacked months before. It was all the same now. I’d made it through with my two pennies, and my reward was that I was now rich with forty dollars and two cents. I paid for my coffee, bought a packaged cookie, and asked the man if there were any showers, but he only shook his head as I looked at him, crestfallen. It was a resort without showers or a restaurant, there was a driving, drizzling rain, and it was something like 55 degrees out.

I refilled my coffee cup and thought about whether I should hike on that day or not. There wasn’t much reason to stay, and yet going back out to walk in the woods with all my wet things was not only dispiriting but possibly dangerous — the inescapable wet chill put me at risk of hypothermia. At least here I could sit in the warmth of the store. I’d been alternately sweating hot or freezing cold for going on three days. I was tired, both physically and psychologically. I’d hiked a few half days, but I hadn’t had a full day off since Crater Lake. Plus, much as I looked forward to reaching the Bridge of the Gods, I wasn’t in any hurry. I was close enough now that I knew I’d easily make it by my birthday. I could take my time.

“We don’t have showers, young lady,” said the old man, “but I can give you dinner tonight, if you’d like to join me and a couple of the staff at five.”

“Dinner?” My decision to stay was made.

I returned to my camp and did my best to dry my things out in between rain showers. I heated a pot of water and hunched naked near it, bathing myself with my bandanna. I took apart my water purifier, shook out the muck that the sandy-haired man had sucked up into it, and ran clean water through my pump so I could use it again. A few minutes before I was going to walk to the small building where I’d been instructed to go for dinner, the Three Young Bucks appeared, soaking wet and dreamier than ever. I literally leapt with joy at the sight of them. I explained to them that I was off to have dinner and they could probably have dinner with me too and I’d be right back to get them if they could, but when I reached the little building and inquired, the woman in charge was unmoved by their arrival.

“We don’t have enough food,” she said. I felt guilty about sitting down to eat, but I was starving. Dinner was family fare, the kind I’d eaten at a thousand potlucks as a kid in Minnesota. Cheddar-cheese-topped casserole with ground beef, canned corn, and potatoes with an iceberg lettuce salad. I filled my plate and ate it in about five bites and sat politely waiting for the woman to cut the yellow cake with white frosting that sat enticingly on a side table. When she did, I ate a piece and then returned to discreetly take another — the biggest piece in the pan — and folded it into a paper napkin and put it in the pocket of my raincoat.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d better get back to my friends.”

I walked across the wet grass, holding the cake very carefully inside my coat. It was only 5:30, but it was so dark and dreary it might as well have been the middle of the night.

“There you are. I was looking for you,” a man called to me. It was the ranger who’d given me my box and letters that morning. He was blotting his lips with a dish towel. “I’m talking funny,” he slurred as I approached him. “I had some surgery on my mouth today.”

I pulled my hood up over my head because it had started to rain again. He seemed slightly drunk in addition to having the troubles with his mouth.

“So how about you come to my place for a drink now? You can get out of the rain,” he said in his garbled voice. “My place is right there, the other half of the station. I got a fire going in the fireplace and I’ll mix you up a nice cocktail or two.”

“Thanks, but I can’t. My friends just got here and we’re all camped,” I said, gesturing to the rise beyond the road, behind which my tent and probably by now the tents of the Three Young Bucks were erected. As I did so, I had a precise image of what the Three Young Bucks were likely doing at that very moment, the way they’d be crouched beneath their raincoats in the rain, trying to eat their loathsome dinners, or sitting alone in their tents because there was simply no other place to be, and then I thought of that warm fire and the booze and how if the men went with me to drink with the ranger I could use them to help me dodge whatever else he had in mind. “But maybe,” I wavered, as the ranger drooled and then blotted his mouth. “I mean, as long as it’s okay to bring my friends.”

I returned with the cake to our camp. The Three Young Bucks were all zipped into their tents. “I have cake!” I called, and they came and stood around me and ate it with their fingers out of my hands, splitting it among themselves in the easy, unspoken way they’d honed over months of endless deprivation and unity.

In the nine days since I’d said goodbye to them, it seemed as if we’d grown closer, more familiar, as if we’d been together in that time instead of apart. They were still the Three Young Bucks to me, but they’d also begun to differentiate in my mind. Richie was hilarious and a little bit strange, with a dark edge of mystery I found compelling. Josh was sweet and smart, more reserved than the others. Rick was funny and incisive, kind and a great conversationalist. As I stood there with the three of them eating cake out of my hands, I realized that though I had a little crush on all of them, I had a bigger crush on Rick. It was an absurd crush, I knew. He was nearly four years younger than me and we were at an age when those nearly four years mattered, when the gap between what he had done and what I had done was large enough that I was more like a big sister than I was someone who should be thinking about being alone with him in his tent — so I didn’t think about it, but I couldn’t deny that to an increasing degree I got a little fluttery feeling inside me every time Rick’s eyes met mine, and I also couldn’t deny that I could see in his eyes that he got a little fluttery feeling too.

“I’m sorry about dinner,” I said, after explaining what had happened. “Did you guys eat?” I asked, feeling guilty, and they all nodded, licking the frosting from their fingers.

“Was it good?” asked Richie in his New Orleans accent, which only increased his appeal, in spite of my crush on Rick.

“It was just a casserole and salad.”

They all three looked at me like I’d injured them.

“But that’s why I brought you the cake!” I cried from beneath my rain hood. “Plus, I have something else that might be of interest. A different sort of treat. The ranger here invited me to his place for a drink and I told him I’d come only if you guys came too. I should warn you that he’s a little bit odd — he had mouth surgery today or something, so I think he’s on painkillers and a bit drunk already, but he has a fireplace with a fire in it and he has drinks and it’s inside. Do you guys want to go?”

The Three Young Bucks gave me their barbarians-loose-upon-the-land look and about two minutes later we were knocking on the ranger’s door.

“There you are,” he slurred as he let us in. “I was beginning to think you were going to stand me up.”

“These are my friends Rick, Richie, and Josh,” I said, though the ranger only looked at them with open disdain, his dish towel still pressed to his lips. It wasn’t true he’d been entirely agreeable about my bringing them along. He’d only barely consented when I’d said it was all of us or none.

The Three Young Bucks filed in and sat in a row on the couch in front of the blazing fire, propping their wet boots up on the stone hearth.

“You want a drink, good-looking?” the ranger asked me as I followed him into the kitchen. “My name’s Guy, by the way. Don’t know if I told you that before or not.”

“Nice to meet you, Guy,” I said, trying to stand in a way that suggested I wasn’t really with him in the kitchen so much as I was bridging the space between us and the men by the fire and that we were all one big happy party.

“I’m making something special for you.”

“For me? Thanks,” I said. “Do you guys want a drink?” I called to the Three Young Bucks. They answered in the affirmative as I watched Guy fill one gigantic plastic tumbler with ice and then pour various kinds of liquor into it and top it off with fruit punch from a can he took from the fridge.

“It’s like a suicide,” I said when he handed it to me. “That’s what we used to call this kind of drink when I was in college, where you put all different kinds of liquor in it.”

“Try it and see if you think it’s good,” said Guy.

I took a sip. It tasted like hell, but in a nice way. It tasted better than sitting out in the cold rain. “Yum!” I said too cheerfully. “And these guys — Rick and Richie and Josh — they’d like one too, I think. Would you guys like one?” I asked again as I bolted to the couch.

“Sure,” they all said in a chorus, though Guy didn’t acknowledge it. I handed Rick the tumbler of booze and wedged myself in beside him, all four of us in a row in the plush wonderland of the fireside couch without an inch to spare, the side of Rick’s lovely body plastered against mine; the fire like our own personal sun before us, baking us dry.

“You want to talk about suicide, darling, I’ll tell you about suicide,” Guy said, coming to stand before me and lean against the stone mantel. Rick drank from the tumbler and handed it to Josh on the other side of him, then Josh took a sip and handed it to Richie on the far end. “We got some dealings with suicide around here, unfortunately. Now that’s where this job gets interesting,” Guy said, his eyes growing animated, his face hidden behind the dish towel from his mustache down. The tumbler made its way slowly back to me; I took a sip and handed it back to Rick, and so on, like we were smoking a gigantic liquid joint. As we drank, Guy told us in great detail about the scene he’d come across one afternoon when a man had blown his brains out in a Port-a-Potty in the woods nearby.

“I mean just absolutely brains fucking everywhere,” he said through the towel. “More than you’d imagine. Think of the most disgusting thing that you can even picture, Cheryl, and then picture that.” He stood staring only at me, as if the Three Young Bucks weren’t even in the room. “Not just brains. But blood too and pieces of his skull and flesh. Just all over. Splattered all over the walls inside this thing.”

“I can’t even picture it,” I said as I shook the ice in my tumbler. The Bucks had left me with sole custody of it now that it was empty.

“You want another one, hot stuff?” Guy asked. I handed it to him, and he took it into the kitchen. I turned to the men and we all looked at one another with meaningful expressions and then burst out laughing as quietly as we could while basking in the glow of the fire.

“Now there’s this other time I got to tell you about,” said Guy, returning with my drink. “Only this time it was murder. Homicide. And it wasn’t brains, but blood. Gallons of blood, I mean BUCKETS of blood, Cheryl.”

And so it went, all through the evening.

Afterwards, we walked back to our camp and stood around in a circle near our tents talking half drunk in the dark until it started to rain again and we had no choice but to disperse and say goodnight. When I got into my tent, I saw a puddle had formed at the far end. By morning it was a small lake; my sleeping bag was soaked. I shook it out and looked around the campsite for a place to drape it, but it was useless. It would only get wetter as the rain continued to pour down. I carried it with me when the Three Young Bucks and I walked to the store, holding it near the woodstove as we drank our coffee.

“So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh.

“What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say.

“The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie.

“Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.”

I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone — the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon — I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.

As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.”

I turned to the Three Young Bucks with a question in my eyes.

Within fifteen minutes, we’d moved into our cabin, hanging our sopped sleeping bags over the dusty rafters. The cabin was one wood-paneled room taken up almost entirely by two double beds that sat on antediluvian metal frames that squeaked if you so much as leaned on the bed.

Once we’d settled in, I walked back to the store in the rain to buy snacks. When I stepped inside, Lisa was standing there by the woodstove. Lisa, who lived in Portland. Lisa, who’d been mailing my boxes all summer long. Lisa, whom I’d be moving in with in a week.

“Hello!” she half screamed while we grabbed each other. “I knew you’d be here right about now,” she said once we’d recovered from the shock. “We decided to drive up and see.” She turned to her boyfriend, Jason, and I shook his hand — I’d met him briefly in the days before I’d left Portland for the PCT, when they’d first begun dating. It felt surreal to see people I knew from my old familiar world and a bit sad too. I was both happy and disappointed to see them: their presence seemed to hasten the end of my trip, underlining the fact that though it would take me a week to get there, Portland was only ninety miles away by car.

By evening we all piled into Jason’s pickup truck and drove along the winding forest roads to Bagby Hot Springs. Bagby is a version of paradise in the woods: a trilevel series of wooden decks that hold tubs of various configurations on a steaming hot creek a mile-and-a-half walk back from a roadside parking area in the Mount Hood National Forest. It’s not a business or a resort or a retreat center. It’s just a place anyone can go for no charge at any hour of the day or night to soak in the natural waters beneath an ancient canopy of Douglas firs, hemlocks, and cedars. Its existence seemed more surreal to me than Lisa standing in the Olallie Lake store.

We practically had the place to ourselves. The Three Young Bucks and I walked to the lower deck, where there were long hand-hewn tubs as big as canoes made from hollowed-out cedars beneath a high airy wooden ceiling. We undressed as the rain fell gently down on the lush branches of the big trees that surrounded us, my eyes skating over their naked bodies in the half light. Rick and I got into neighboring tubs and turned on the spigots, moaning as the hot, mineral-rich water rose around us. I remembered my bath in that hotel in Sierra City before I hiked up into the snow. It seemed fitting that I was here now, with only a week left to go, like I’d survived a hard and beautiful dream.

I’d ridden up front with Lisa and Jason on the drive to Bagby, but on the return trip to Olallie Lake, I climbed in back with the Three Young Bucks, feeling clean and warm and blissed out as I clambered onto the futon that covered the truck’s bed.

“That futon is yours, by the way,” said Lisa, before she closed the camper hatch behind us. “I took it out of your truck and put it in here in case we decided to spend the night.”

“Welcome to my bed, boys,” I said in a mockingly lascivious tone to cover for the dislocation I felt at the prospect that this really was my bed — the futon I’d shared with Paul for years. The thought of him dimmed my ecstatic mood. I hadn’t yet opened the letter he’d sent me, in contrast to the customary envelope-ripping glee with which I usually greeted mail. The sight of his familiar handwriting had given me pause this time. I’d decided to read it once I was back on the trail, perhaps because I knew that this would prevent me from mailing off an immediate reply, from saying rash and passionate things that weren’t true any longer. “I’ll always be married to you in my heart,” I’d told him on the day we’d filed for divorce. It had been only five months ago, but already I doubted what I’d said. My love for him was indisputable, but my allegiance to him wasn’t. We were no longer married, and as I settled alongside the Three Young Bucks into the bed I used to share with Paul, I felt a kind of acceptance of that, a kind of clarity where there’d been so much uncertainty.

The four of us lay wedged in across the futon’s expanse as the truck bumped over the dark roads — me, Rick, Josh, and Richie, in that order across the truck’s bed. There wasn’t an inch to spare, just as it had been on the deranged ranger’s couch the night before. The side of Rick’s body was pressed against mine, ever so slightly tilted in my direction and away from Josh. The sky had finally cleared and I could see the almost full moon.

“Look,” I said just to Rick, gesturing toward the window of the camper at the sky. We spoke quietly of the moons we’d seen on the trail and where we’d been when we’d seen them and of the trail ahead.

“You’ll have to give me Lisa’s number so we can hang out in Portland,” he said. “I’ll be living there too after I finish the trail.”

“Absolutely, we’ll hang out,” I said.

“For sure,” he said, and looked at me in this delicate way that made me swoon, though I realized that in spite of the fact that I liked him perhaps a thousand times more than a good number of the people I’d slept with, I wasn’t going to lay a hand on him, no matter how deeply I longed to. Laying a hand on him was as far away as the moon. And it wasn’t just because he was younger than me or because two of his friends were in bed with us, pressed up against his very back. It was because for once it was finally enough for me to simply lie there in a restrained and chaste rapture beside a sweet, strong, sexy, smart, good man who was probably never meant to be anything but my friend. For once I didn’t ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn’t thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn’t even live for me anymore.

“I’m really glad I met you,” I said.

“Me too,” said Rick. “Who wouldn’t be glad to meet the Queen of the PCT?”

I smiled at him and turned to gaze out the little window at the moon again, intensely aware of the side of his body so warm against mine as we lay together in an exquisitely conscious silence.

“Very nice,” said Rick after a while. “Very nice,” he repeated, with more emphasis the second time.

“What is?” I asked, turning to him, though I knew.

“Everything,” he said.

And it was true.

19 THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

The next morning the sky was clear blue, the sun shimmering on Olallie Lake, views of Mount Jefferson framed perfectly to the south and Olallie Butte to the north. I sat on one of the picnic tables near the ranger station, packing Monster for the final stretch of my hike. The Three Young Bucks had left at dawn, in a hurry to reach Canada before the High Cascades of Washington were snowed in, but I wasn’t going that far. I could take my time.

Guy appeared with a box in his hands, sober now, breaking me out of my contemplative trance. “I’m glad I caught you before you left. This just came,” he said.

I took the box from him and glanced at the return address. It was from my friend Gretchen. “Thanks for everything,” I said to Guy as he walked away. “For the drinks the other night and the hospitality.”

“Stay safe out there,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the building. I ripped open the box and gasped when I saw what was inside: a dozen fancy chocolates in shiny twisted wrappers and a bottle of red wine. I ate some chocolate immediately while pondering the wine. Much as I wanted to open it that night on the trail, I wasn’t willing to lug the empty bottle all the way to Timberline Lodge. I packed up the last of my things, strapped on Monster, picked up the wine and the empty box, and began to walk to the ranger station.

“Cheryl!” a voice boomed, and I turned.

“There you are! There you are! I caught you! I caught you!” shouted a man as he came at me. I was so startled, I dropped the box on the grass as the man shook his fists in the air and let out a joyous hoot that I recognized but couldn’t place. He was young and bearded and golden, different and yet the same as the last time I’d seen him. “Cheryl!” he yelled again as he practically tackled me into an embrace.

It was as if time moved in slow motion from the moment that I didn’t know who he was to the moment that I did know, but I couldn’t take it into my consciousness until he had me all the way in his arms and I yelled, “DOUG!”

“Doug, Doug, Doug!” I kept saying.

“Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl!” he said to me.

Then we went silent and stepped back and looked at each other.

“You’ve lost weight,” he said.

“So have you,” I said.

“You’re all broken in now,” he said.

“I know! So are you.”

“I have a beard,” he said, tugging on it. “I have so much to tell you.”

“Me too! Where’s Tom?”

“He’s a few miles back. He’ll catch up later.”

“Did you make it through the snow?” I asked.

“We did some, but it got to be too intense and we came down and ended up bypassing.”

I shook my head, still shocked he was standing there. I told him about Greg getting off the trail and asked him about Albert and Matt.

“I haven’t heard anything about them since we saw them last.” He looked at me and smiled, his eyes sparkling to life. “We read your notes in the register all summer long. They motivated us to crank. We wanted to catch up to you.”

“I was just leaving now,” I said. I bent to retrieve the empty box I’d dropped in the excitement. “Another minute and I’d have been gone and who knows if you’d have caught me.”

“I’d have caught you,” he said, and laughed in that golden boy way that I remembered so vividly, though it was altered now too. He was grittier than he’d been before, slightly more shaken, as if he’d aged a few years in the past months. “You want to hang out while I organize my things and we can leave together?”

“Sure,” I said without hesitation. “I’ve got to hike those last days before I get into Cascade Locks alone — you know, just to finish like I started — but let’s hike together to Timberline Lodge.”

“Holy shit, Cheryl.” He pulled me in for another hug. “I can’t believe we’re here together. Hey, you still have that black feather I gave you?” He reached to touch its ragged edge.

“It was my good luck charm,” I said.

“What’s with the wine?” he asked, pointing to the bottle in my hand.

“I’m going to give it to the ranger,” I replied, lifting it high. “I don’t want to carry it all the way to Timberline.”

“Are you insane?” Doug asked. “Give me that bottle.”

We opened it that night at our camp near the Warm Springs River with the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife. The day had warmed into the low seventies, but the evening was cool, the crisp edge of summer turning to autumn everywhere around us. The leaves on the trees had thinned almost undetectably; the tall stalks of wildflowers bent down onto themselves, plumped with rot. Doug and I built a fire as our dinners cooked and then sat eating from our pots and passing the wine back and forth, drinking straight from the bottle since neither of us had a cup. The wine and the fire and being in Doug’s company again after all this time felt like a rite of passage, like a ceremonial marking of the end of my journey.

After a while, we each turned abruptly toward the darkness, hearing the yip of coyotes more near than far.

“That sound always makes my hair stand on end,” Doug said. He took a sip from the bottle and handed it to me. “This wine’s really good.”

“It is,” I agreed, and took a swig. “I heard coyotes a lot this summer,” I said.

“And you weren’t afraid, right? Isn’t that what you told yourself?”

“It is what I told myself,” I said. “Except every once in while,” I added. “When I was.”

“Me too.” He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder and I put my hand on his and squeezed it. He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.

When we were done with the wine, I went to Monster and pulled out the ziplock bag that held my books. “You need something to read?” I asked Doug, holding The Ten Thousand Things up to him, but he shook his head. I’d finished it a few days before, though I hadn’t been able to burn it because of the rain. Unlike most of the other books I’d read on my hike, I’d already read The Ten Thousand Things when I’d packed it into my resupply box months before. A densely lyrical novel set on the Moluccan Islands in Indonesia, it had been written in Dutch and published to critical acclaim in 1955, but mostly forgotten now. I’d never met anyone who’d read the book, aside from the college writing professor who’d assigned it to me in the fiction workshop I was enrolled in when my mother got sick. The title hadn’t been lost on me as I’d sat dutifully reading it in my mother’s hospital room, attempting to shut out my fear and sorrow by forcing my mind to focus on passages I hoped to refer to in the following week’s class discussion, but it was useless. I couldn’t think of anything but my mom. Besides, I already knew about the ten thousand things. They were all the named and unnamed things in the world and together they added up to less than how much my mother loved me. And me her. So when I was packing for the PCT, I’d decided to give the book another chance. I hadn’t had any trouble focusing this time. From the very first page, I understood. Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.

“I think I’m going to turn in,” said Doug, holding the empty bottle of wine. “Tom’ll probably catch up to us tomorrow.”

“I’ll put the fire out,” I said.

When he was gone, I ripped the pages of The Ten Thousand Things from their gummy paperback binding and set them into the fire in thin clumps, prodding them with a stick until they burned. As I stared at the flames, I thought about Eddie, the same as I did just about every time I sat by a fire. It had been he who’d taught me how to build one. Eddie was the one who’d taken me camping the first time. He’d shown me how to pitch a tent and tie a knot in a rope. From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. In the three years after he fell in love with my mother, he’d taken us camping and canoeing along the Minnesota and St. Croix and Namekagon rivers practically every weekend from June to September, and after we’d moved north onto the land my family had bought with the proceeds from his broken back, he’d taught me even more about the woods.

There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.

When The Ten Thousand Things had turned to ash, I pulled out the other book in my ziplock bag. It was The Dream of a Common Language. I’d carried it all this way, though I hadn’t opened it since that first night on the trail. I hadn’t needed to. I knew what it said. Its lines had run all summer through the mix-tape radio station in my head, fragments from various poems or sometimes the title of the book itself, which was also a line from a poem: the dream of a common language. I opened the book and paged through it, leaning forward so I could see the words by the firelight. I read a line or two from a dozen or so of the poems, each of them so familiar they gave me a strange sort of comfort. I’d chanted those lines silently through the days while I hiked. Often, I didn’t know exactly what they meant, yet there was another way in which I knew their meaning entirely, as if it were all before me and yet out of my grasp, their meaning like a fish just beneath the surface of the water that I tried to catch with my bare hands — so close and present and belonging to me — until I reached for it and it flashed away.

I closed the book and looked at its beige cover. There was no reason not to burn this book too.

Instead, I only hugged it to my chest.

We reached Timberline Lodge a couple of days later. By then it wasn’t just Doug and me. Tom had caught up to us, and we’d also been joined by two women — a twenty-something ex-couple who were hiking Oregon and a small section of Washington. The five of us hiked together in duos and trios of various formations, or sometimes all of us in a row, making a leisurely party of it, the vibe festive because of our numbers and the cool sunny days. On our long breaks we played hacky sack and skinny-dipped in an icy-cold lake, incited the wrath of a handful of hornets and then ran from them while we laughed and screamed. By the time we reached Timberline Lodge 6,000 feet up on the south flank of Mount Hood, we were like a tribe, bonded in that way I imagined kids felt when they spent a week together at summer camp.

It was midafternoon when we arrived. In the lounge the five of us took over a pair of couches that faced each other across a low wooden table and ordered terribly expensive sandwiches, then afterwards sipped coffees spiked with Baileys while we played poker and rummy five hundred with a deck of cards we borrowed from the bartender. The slope of Mount Hood rose above us just outside the lodge’s windows. At 11,240 feet, it’s Oregon’s highest mountain — a volcano like all the others I’d passed since I entered the Cascade Range south of Lassen Peak way back in July — but this, the last of the major mountains I’d traverse on my hike, felt like the most important, and not only because I was sitting on its very haunches. The sight of it had become familiar to me, its imposing grandeur visible from Portland on clear days. Once I reached Mount Hood I realized I felt ever so slightly like I was home. Portland — where I’d never technically lived, in spite of all that had happened in the eight or nine months I’d spent there over the past two years — was only sixty miles away.

From afar, the sight of Mount Hood had never failed to take my breath away, but up close it was different, the way everything is. It was less coolly majestic, at once more ordinary and more immeasurable in its gritty authority. The landscape outside the north windows of the lodge was not the glistening white peak one sees from miles away, but a grayish and slightly barren slope dotted with a few scraggly stands of pines and a smattering of lupine and asters that grew among the rocks. The natural landscape was punctuated by a ski lift that led to the crusty swath of snow farther up. I was happy to be protected from the mountain for a time, ensconced inside the glorious lodge, a wonderland in the rough. It’s a grand stone-and-wood structure that was hand-hewn by Works Progress Administration workers in the mid-1930s. Everything about the place has a story. The art on the walls, the architecture of the building, the handwoven fabrics that cover the furniture — each piece carefully crafted to reflect the history, culture, and natural resources of the Pacific Northwest.

I excused myself from the others and walked slowly through the lodge, then stepped out onto a wide south-facing patio. It was a clear, sunny day and I could see for more than a hundred miles. The view included so many of the mountains I’d hiked past — two of the Three Sisters and Mount Jefferson and Broken Finger.

Hop, skip, spin, done, I thought. I was here. I was almost there. But I wasn’t done. I still had fifty miles to walk before I reached the Bridge of the Gods.

The next morning I said goodbye to Doug and Tom and the two women and I hiked away alone, climbing up the short steep path that went from the lodge to the PCT. I passed under the ski lift and edged my way north and west around the shoulder of Mount Hood on a trail of what seemed to be demolished rock, worn down by the harsh winters into a pebbly sand. By the time I crossed into the Mount Hood Wilderness twenty minutes later, I had entered the forest again and I felt the silence descend on me.

It felt good to be alone. It felt spectacular. It was the middle of September, but the sun was warm and bright, the sky bluer than ever. The trail opened up into miles-wide views and then closed around me into dense woods before opening back up again. I walked for ten miles without pause, crossed the Sandy River, and stopped to sit on a small flat shelf looking over it from the other side. Nearly all the pages of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington were gone by now. What was left of my guidebook was folded into the pocket of my shorts. I took out the pages and read them again, letting myself go all the way to the end. I was thrilled by the prospect of reaching Cascade Locks and also saddened by it. I didn’t know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking alone through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life, but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.

I went to the river and squatted down and splashed my face. It was narrow and shallow here, so late in the summer and so high up, barely bigger than a stream. Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight.

On the other side of the river, I let myself think.

And something inside of me released.

In the days that followed, I passed Ramona Falls and skirted in and out of the Columbia Wilderness. I caught views of Mounts St. Helens and Rainier and Adams far to the north. I reached Wahtum Lake and turned off the PCT and onto the alternate route the authors of my guidebook recommended, which would lead me down to Eagle Creek and into the Columbia River gorge and eventually to the river itself that ran alongside the town of Cascade Locks.

Down, down, down I went on that last full day of hiking, descending four thousand feet in just over sixteen miles, the creeks and streams and trailside seeps I crossed and paralleled going down and down too. I could feel the river pulling me like a great magnet below and to the north. I could feel myself coming to the end of things. I stopped to spend the night on the banks of Eagle Creek. It was five o’clock and I was only six miles away from Cascade Locks. I could have been in town by dark, but I didn’t want to finish my trip that way. I wanted to take my time, to see the river and the Bridge of the Gods in the bright light of day.

That evening I sat next to Eagle Creek watching the water rush over the rocks. My feet were killing me from the long descent. Even after all this way, with my body now stronger than it had ever been and would likely ever be, hiking on the PCT still hurt. New blisters had formed on my toes in places that had gone soft from the relatively few extreme descents throughout Oregon. I put my fingers delicately to them, soothing them with my touch. Another toenail looked like it was finally going to come off. I gave it a gentle tug and it was in my hand, my sixth. I had only four intact toenails left.

The PCT and I weren’t tied anymore. The score was 4–6, advantage trail.

I slept on my tarp, not wanting to shelter myself on that last night, and woke before dawn to watch the sun rise over Mount Hood. It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that. I sat for a long while, letting the light fill the sky, letting it expand and reach down into the trees. I closed my eyes and listened hard to Eagle Creek.

It was running to the Columbia River, like me.

I seemed to float the four miles to the little parking area near the head of the Eagle Creek Trail, buoyed by a pure, unadulterated emotion that can only be described as joy. I strolled through the mostly empty parking lot and passed the restrooms, then followed another trail that would take me the two miles into Cascade Locks. The trail turned sharply to the right, and before me was the Columbia River, visible through the chain-link fence that bordered the trail to set it off from Interstate 84 just below. I stopped and grasped the fence and stared. It seemed like a miracle that I finally had the river in my sights, as if a newborn baby had just slipped finally into my palms after a long labor. That glimmering dark water was more beautiful than anything I’d imagined during all those miles I’d hiked to reach it.

I walked east along a lush green corridor, the roadbed of the long-abandoned Columbia River Highway, which had been made into a trail. I could see patches of concrete in places, but the road had mostly been reclaimed by the moss that grew along the rocks at the road’s edge, the trees that hung heavy and low over it, the spiders who’d spun webs that crossed its expanse. I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face, pulling them out of my hair. I could hear but not see the rush of automobiles on the interstate to my left, which ran between the river and me, the ordinary sound of them, a great whooshing whine and hum.

When I emerged from the forest, I was in Cascade Locks, which unlike so many towns on the trail was an actual town, with a population of a little more than a thousand. It was Friday morning and I could feel the Friday morningness emanating from the houses I passed. I walked beneath the freeway and wended my way along the streets with my ski pole clicking against the pavement, my heart racing when the bridge came into view. It’s an elegant steel truss cantilever, named for a natural bridge that was formed by a major landslide approximately three hundred years ago that had temporarily dammed the Columbia River. The local Native Americans had called it the Bridge of the Gods. The human-made structure that took its name spans the Columbia for a little more than a third of a mile, connecting Oregon to Washington, the towns of Cascade Locks and Stevenson on either side. There’s a tollbooth on the Oregon side and when I reached it the woman who worked inside told me I could cross the bridge, no charge.

“I’m not crossing,” I said. “I only want to touch it.” I walked along the shoulder of the road until I reached the concrete stanchion of the bridge, put my hand on it, and looked down at the Columbia River flowing beneath me. It’s the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and the fourth largest in the nation. Native Americans have lived on the river for thousands of years, sustained by its once-bountiful salmon for most of them. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had paddled down the Columbia in dugout canoes on their famous expedition in 1805. One hundred and ninety years later, two days before my twenty-seventh birthday, here I was.

I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet. I stood there for several minutes, cars and trucks going past me, feeling like I’d cry, though I didn’t.

Weeks before, I’d heard on the trail grapevine that once I reached Cascade Locks I had to go to the East Wind Drive-In for one of their famously large ice-cream cones. For that reason, I’d saved a couple of dollars when I was at Timberline Lodge. I left the bridge and made my way along a busy street that ran parallel to the river and the interstate; the road and much of the town were sandwiched between the two. It was still morning and the drive-in wasn’t open yet, so I sat on the little white wooden bench in front with Monster by my side.

I would be in Portland later that day. It was only forty-five miles away, to the west. I’d sleep on my old futon beneath a roof. I’d unpack my CDs and stereo and listen to any song I liked. I’d wear my black lace bra and underwear and blue jeans. I’d consume all the amazing foods and drinks that could be had. I’d drive my truck anywhere I wanted to go. I’d set up my computer and write my novel. I’d take the boxes of books I’d brought with me from Minnesota and sell them the next day at Powell’s, so I’d have some cash. I’d have a yard sale to see me through until I got a job. I’d set out my thrift store dresses and miniature binoculars and foldable saw on the grass and get for them anything I could. The thought of it all astounded me.

“We’re ready for you,” a woman called, poking her head out of the sliding window that fronted the drive-in.

I ordered a chocolate-vanilla twist cone; a few moments later she handed it to me and took my two dollars and gave me two dimes in change. It was the last money I had in the world. Twenty cents. I sat on the white bench and ate every bit of my cone and then watched the cars again. I was the only customer at the drive-in until a BMW pulled up and a young man in a business suit got out.

“Hi,” he said to me as he passed. He was about my age, his hair gelled back, his shoes impeccable. Once he had his cone, he returned to stand near me.

“Looks like you’ve been backpacking.”

“Yes. On the Pacific Crest Trail. I walked over eleven hundred miles,” I said, too excited to contain myself. “I just finished my trip this morning.”

“Really?”

I nodded and laughed.

“That’s incredible. I’ve always wanted to do something like that. A big journey.”

“You could. You should. Believe me, if I can do this, anyone can.”

“I can’t get the time off of work — I’m an attorney,” he said. He tossed the uneaten half of his cone into the garbage can and wiped his hands on a napkin. “What are you going to do now?”

“Go to Portland. I’m going to live there awhile.”

“I live there too. I’m on my way there now if you want a ride. I’d be happy to drop you off wherever you’d like.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I want to stay here for a while. Just to take it all in.”

He pulled a business card from his wallet and handed it to me. “Give me a call once you settle in. I’d love to take you out to lunch and hear more about your trip.”

“Okay,” I said, looking at the card. It was white with blue embossed letters, a relic from another world.

“It was an honor to meet you at this momentous juncture,” he said.

“Nice to meet you too,” I said, shaking his hand.

After he drove away, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes against the sun as the tears I’d expected earlier at the bridge began to seep from my eyes. Thank you, I thought over and over again. Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me. How I’d never see the man in the BMW again, but how in four years I’d cross the Bridge of the Gods with another man and marry him in a spot almost visible from where I now sat. How in nine years that man and I would have a son named Carver, and a year and a half after that, a daughter named Bobbi. How in fifteen years I’d bring my family to this same white bench and the four of us would eat ice-cream cones while I told them the story of the time I’d been here once before, when I’d finished walking a long way on something called the Pacific Crest Trail. And how it would be only then that the meaning of my hike would unfold inside of me, the secret I’d always told myself finally revealed.

Which would bring me to this telling.

I didn’t know how I’d reach back through the years and look for and find some of the people I’d met on the trail and that I’d look for and not find others. Or how in one case I’d find something I didn’t expect: an obituary. Doug’s. I didn’t know I’d read that he’d died nine years after we’d said goodbye on the PCT — killed in a kite-sailing accident in New Zealand. Or how, after I’d cried remembering what a golden boy he’d been, I’d go to the farthest corner of my basement, to the place where Monster hung on a pair of rusty nails, and I’d see that the raven feather Doug had given me was broken and frayed now, but still there — wedged into my pack’s frame, where I placed it years ago.

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.