ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9 страница

It was just as well, I knew, that I simply let myself look and feel and smell the way I did. I was, after all, what Ed referred to somewhat inaccurately as the only girl in the woods, alone with a gang of men. By necessity, out here on the trail, I felt I had to sexually neutralize the men I met by being, to the extent that was possible, one of them.

I’d never been that way in my life, interacting with men in the even-keeled indifference that being one of the guys entails. It didn’t feel like an easy thing to endure, as I sat in my tent while the men played cards. I’d been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me. Suppressing those powers gave me a gloomy twinge in the gut. Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I’d become expert at being among men. It was a version of myself I’d first tasted way back when I was a child of eleven and I’d felt that prickly rush of power when grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say Hey pretty baby just loudly enough that I could hear. The one I’d banked on all through high school, starving myself thin, playing cute and dumb so I’d be popular and loved. The one I’d fostered all through my young adult years while trying on different costumes—earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me.

Now there was only one version. On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world. Which, at least for now, consisted of only six men.

“Cherylllll,” Doug’s voice called softly from a few feet away. “You in there?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“We’re going down to the river. Come hang with us.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling flattered in spite of myself. When I sat up, the condom made a crinkling sound in my back pocket. I took it out and slid it into my first aid kit, crawled out of my tent, and walked toward the river.

Doug, Tom, and Greg were wading in the shallow spot where I’d cleaned up a few hours before. Beyond them, the water raged in torrents, rushing over boulders as big as my tent. I thought of the snow I’d soon be encountering if I continued on with the ice ax I didn’t yet know how to use and the white ski pole with its cute little pink wrist strap that had come to me only by chance. I hadn’t yet begun to think about what was next on the trail. I’d only listened and nodded when Ed told me that most of the PCT hikers who’d come through Kennedy Meadows in the three weeks he’d been camped here had opted to get off the trail at this point because of the record snowpack that made the trail essentially unpassable for most of the next four or five hundred miles. They caught rides and buses to rejoin the PCT farther north, at lower elevations, he told me. Some intended to loop back later in the summer to hike the section they’d missed; others to skip it. He said that a few had ended their hikes altogether, just as Greg had told me earlier, deciding to hike the PCT another, less record-breaking year. And fewer still had forged ahead, determined to make it through the snow.

Grateful for my cheap camp sandals, I picked my way over the rocks that lined the riverbed toward the men, the water so cold my bones hurt.

“I got something for you,” said Doug when I reached him. He held his hand out to me. In it was a shiny feather, about a foot long, so black it shone blue in the sun.

“For what?” I asked, taking it from him.

“For luck,” he said, and touched my arm.

When he took his hand away, the place where it had been felt like a burn—I could feel how little I’d been touched in the past fourteen days, how alone I’d been.

“So I was thinking about the snow,” I said, holding the feather, my voice raised over the rush of the river. “The people who bypassed? They were all here a week or two before us. A lot more snow has melted by now, so maybe it’ll be okay.” I looked at Greg and then at the black feather, stroking it.

“The snow depth at Bighorn Plateau on June first was more than double what it was the same day last year,” he said, tossing a stone. “A week isn’t going to make much of a difference in that regard.”

I nodded, as if I knew where Bighorn Plateau was, or what it meant for the snowpack to be double what it was a year ago. I felt like a fraud even having this discussion, like a mascot among players, as if they were the real PCT hikers and I was just happening through. As if somehow, because of my inexperience, my failure to read even a single page written by Ray Jardine, my laughably slow pace, and my belief that it had been reasonable to pack a foldable saw, I had not actually hiked to Kennedy Meadows from Tehachapi Pass, but instead had been carried along.

But I had walked here, and I wasn’t ready to give up on seeing the High Sierra just yet. It had been the section of the trail I’d most anticipated, its untouched beauty extolled by the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California and immortalized by the naturalist John Muir in the books he’d written a century before. It was the section of mountains he’d dubbed the “Range of Light.” The High Sierra and its 13,000- and 14,000-foot-high peaks, its cold, clear lakes and deep canyons were the point of hiking the PCT in California, it seemed. Plus, bypassing it would be a logistical mess. If I had to skip the High Sierra, I’d end up in Ashland more than a month before I intended to.

“I’d like to push on, if there’s a way,” I said, waving the feather with a flourish. My feet didn’t hurt anymore. They’d gone blissfully numb in the icy water.

“Well, we do have about forty miles to play with before the going gets seriously rough—from here up to Trail Pass,” said Doug. “There’s a trail there that intersects the PCT and goes down to a campground. We can hike at least that far and see how it goes—see how much snow there is—and then bail out there if we want to.”

“What do you think of that, Greg?” I asked. Whatever he would do was what I’d do.

He nodded. “I think that’s a good plan.”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I have my ice ax now.”

Greg looked at me. “You know how to use it?”

The next morning he gave me a tutorial.

“This is the shaft,” he said, running his hand up the length of the ax. “And this is the spike,” he added, touching a finger to the sharp end. “And on the other end there’s the head.”

The shaft? The head? The spike? I tried not to crack up like an eighth grader in sex ed class, but I couldn’t help myself.

“What?” asked Greg, his hand around the shaft of his ax, but I only shook my head. “You’ve got two edges,” he continued. “The blunt edge is the adze. That’s what you use to chop your steps. And the other edge is the pick. That’s what you use to save your ass when you’re sliding off the side of the mountain.” He spoke in a tone that assumed I knew this already, as if he were just reviewing the basics before we got started.

“Yep. The shaft, the head, the spike, the pick, the ad,” I said.

“The adze,” he corrected. “There’s a z.” We were standing on a steep bank along the river, the closest thing we could find to simulate an icy slope. “Now let’s say you’re falling,” said Greg, throwing himself down the incline to demonstrate. As he fell, he jammed the pick into the mud. “You want to dig that pick in as hard as you can, while holding on to the shaft with one hand and the head with the other. Like this. And once you’re anchored in, you try to get your footing.”

I looked at him. “What if you can’t get your footing?”

“Well, then you hold on here,” he answered, moving his hands on the ax.

“What if I can’t hold on that long? I mean, I’ll have my pack and everything and, actually, I’m not strong enough to do a single pull-up.”

“You hold on,” he said dispassionately. “Unless you’d rather slide off the side of the mountain.”

I got to work. Again and again I threw myself against the increasingly muddy slope, pretending that I was slipping on ice, and again and again I planted the pick of my ice ax into the soil while Greg watched, coaching and critiquing my technique.

Doug and Tom sat nearby pretending they weren’t paying attention. Albert and Matt were lying on a tarp we’d spread out for them beneath the shade of a tree near Ed’s truck, too ill to move anywhere but to the outhouse several times an hour. They’d both woken in the middle of the night sick with what we were all beginning to believe was giardia—a waterborne parasite that causes crippling diarrhea and nausea, requires prescription medication to cure, and almost always means a week or more off the trail. It was the reason PCT hikers spent so much time talking about water purifiers and water sources, for fear they’d make one wrong move and have to pay. I didn’t know where Matt and Albert had picked up whatever they had, but I prayed I hadn’t picked it up too. By late afternoon we all stood over them as they lay pale and limp on their tarp, convincing them it was time they got to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Too sick to resist, they watched as we packed their things and loaded their packs into the back of Ed’s truck.

“Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack,” I said to Albert when we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”

He gave me a weak smile and nodded.

“By the way,” I said, “I wanted to tell you—about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died—she was only forty-five and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten offtrack. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.

“Well, you’ve got your bearings now, haven’t you?” he said, and sat up, his face lighting up despite his nausea. He rose and walked slowly to Ed’s truck and got in beside his son. I clambered into the back with their backpacks and the box of things I no longer needed and rode with them as far as the general store. When we reached it, Ed stopped for a few moments; I jumped out with my box and waved to Albert and Matt, hollering good luck.

I felt a stinging rush of affection as I watched them drive away. Ed would return in a few hours, but most likely I’d never see Albert and Matt again. I would be hiking into the High Sierra with Doug and Tom the next day, and in the morning I’d have to say goodbye to Ed and Greg too—Greg was laying over in Kennedy Meadows another day, and though he would certainly catch up to me, it would likely be a fleeting visit, and then he too would pass out of my life.

I walked to the porch of the general store and put everything but the foldable saw, the special high-tech flash for my camera, and the miniature binoculars into the PCT hiker free box. Those I packed into my old resupply box and addressed it to Lisa in Portland. As I sealed my box with a roll of tape Ed had loaned me, I kept having the feeling that something was missing.

Later, as I walked the road back to the campground, I realized what it was: the fat roll of condoms.

Every last one was gone.

PART THREE

RANGE OF LIGHT

We are now in the mountains

and they are in us …

JOHN MUIR,
My First Summer in the Sierra

If your Nerve, deny you –

Go above your Nerve –

EMILY DICKINSON

CORVIDOLOGY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We decided to push on,” said Doug.

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

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

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

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

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

“We want to try it,” said Tom.

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

“Why can’t you?” Doug asked.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

“About five hundred miles,” he answered.

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

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

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

“I am too,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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