ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 17 страница

I was lost but I was not afraid, I told myself as I made my dinner. I had plenty of food and water. Everything I needed to survive for a week or more was in my backpack. If I kept walking I’d find civilization eventually. And yet, when I crawled into my tent, I shivered with palpable gratitude for the familiar shelter of the green nylon and mesh walls that had become my home. I squiggled my feet carefully out of my duct tape booties and set them in the corner. I scanned the maps in my guidebook for the hundredth time that day, feeling frustrated and uncertain. At last I simply gave up and devoured a hundred pages of Lolita, sinking into its awful and hilarious reality so thoroughly that I forgot my own.

In the morning, I realized I didn’t have my Bob Marley T-shirt. I’d left it on that branch to dry the day before. Losing my boots was bad. But losing my Bob Marley T-shirt was worse. That shirt wasn’t just any old shirt. It was, at least according to Paco, a sacred shirt that meant I walked with the spirits of the animals, earth, and sky. I didn’t know if I believed that, but the shirt had become an emblem of something I couldn’t quite name.

I reinforced my duct tape booties with another layer of tape and walked all through the humid day. The night before, I’d made a plan: I would follow this road wherever it led me. I’d ignore all the others that crossed its path, no matter how intriguing or promising they looked. I’d finally become convinced that if I didn’t, I’d only walk an endless maze. By late afternoon I sensed that the road was leading me somewhere. It got wider and less rutted and the forest opened up ahead. Finally, I rounded a bend and saw an unmanned tractor. Beyond the tractor, there was a paved two-lane road. I crossed it, turned left, and walked along its shoulder. I was on Highway 89, I could only assume. I pulled out my maps and traced a route I could hitchhike back to the PCT and then set to work trying to get a ride, feeling self-conscious in my metal-gray boots made of tape. Cars passed in clumps of two and three with long breaks in between. I stood on the highway for half an hour holding out my thumb, feeling a mounting anxiety. At last, a man driving a pickup truck pulled to the side. I went to the passenger door and opened it up.

“You can throw your pack in the back,” he said. He was a large bull of a man, in his late forties, I guessed.

“Is this Highway 89?” I asked.

He looked at me, befuddled. “You don’t even know what road you’re on?”

I shook my head.

“What in the Lord’s name have you got on your feet?” he asked.

Nearly an hour later, he dropped me off at a place where the PCT crossed a gravel road in the forest, not unlike those I’d followed when lost the day before. The next day I hiked at what for me was record speed, spurred on by my desire to reach Castle Crags by day’s end. My guidebook explained that, as usual, I wouldn’t exactly be arriving at a town. The trail emerged at a state park that bordered a convenience store and post office, but that was enough for me. The post office would have my boots and my resupply box. The convenience store had a small restaurant where I could fulfill at least some of my food and beverage fantasies once I retrieved the twenty-dollar bill from my box. And the state park offered a free campsite to PCT hikers, where I could also get a hot shower.

By the time I dragged into Castle Crags at three, I was almost barefoot, my booties disintegrating. I hobbled into the post office with strips of dirt-caked tape flapping along beside me and inquired about my mail.

“There should be two boxes for me,” I added, feeling desperate about the package from REI. As I waited for the clerk to return from the back room, it occurred to me that I might have something else besides the boots and my resupply box: letters. I’d sent notifications to all the stops I’d missed when I’d bypassed, instructing that my mail be forwarded here.

“Here you go,” said the clerk, setting my resupply box heavily on the counter.

“But, there should be … Is there something from REI? It would be—”

“One thing at a time,” she called as she returned to the back room.

By the time I walked out of the post office, I was almost whooping out loud with joy and relief. Along with the pristine cardboard box that contained my boots—my boots!—I held nine letters, addressed to me at stops along the way I hadn’t gone, written in hands I recognized. I sat on the concrete near the little building, shuffling quickly through the envelopes, too overwhelmed to open any yet. One was from Paul. One was from Joe. Another was from Karen. The rest were from friends scattered around the country. I set them aside and ripped the box from REI open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped in paper, were my brown leather boots.

The same boots that had gone over the side of the mountain, only new and one size bigger.

“Cheryl!” a woman called, and I looked up. It was Sarah, one of the women from the two couples I’d met in Burney Falls, standing there without her pack. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?” I replied. I expected her to still be behind me on the trail.

“We got lost. We ended up coming out on the highway and hitching a ride.”

“I got lost too!” I said in delighted surprise, grateful that I wasn’t the only one who’d managed to lose the trail.

“Everyone got lost,” she said. “Come on,” she gestured to the entrance of the restaurant at the end of the building. “We’re all inside.”

“I’ll be right in,” I said. After she left, I took my new boots out of their box, peeled off my booties for the last time, and tossed them into a nearby garbage can. I opened my resupply box and found a fresh pair of clean, never-worn socks, put them on my filthy feet, and then laced my boots on. They were impeccably clean. They seemed almost a work of art in their perfection as I paced the parking lot. The wonder of their virgin tread; the glory of their unmarked toes. They felt stiff, but roomy; like they would work, though I worried about the fact that I’d be breaking them in on the trail. There was nothing I could do but hope for the best.

“Cheryl!” Rex boomed when I walked into the restaurant. Stacy was sitting beside him, and beside her were Sam and Helen and John and Sarah, the six of them practically filling the small restaurant.

“Welcome to paradise,” said John with a bottle of beer in hand.

We ate cheeseburgers and fries, then afterwards walked through the convenience store in postprandial ecstasy, loading our arms full of chips and cookies and beer and double-sized bottles of cheap red wine, pooling our money to pay for it all. The seven of us trooped giddily up a hill to the state park campground, where we crammed our tents close together in a circle in the designated free campsite and spent the evening around the picnic table, laughing and telling story after story as the light faded from the sky. While we talked, two black bears—who actually looked black—emerged from the trees that ringed our campsite, only mildly afraid of us when we shouted at them to go away.

Throughout the evening I repeatedly filled the little paper cup I’d taken from the convenience store, gulping smooth sips of wine as if it were water until it tasted like nothing but water to me. It didn’t feel like I’d hiked seventeen miles in midnineties heat that day with a pack on my back and duct tape wound around my feet. It seemed as if I’d floated there instead. Like the picnic table was the best place I’d ever been or would ever be. I didn’t realize that I was drunk until we all decided to turn in and I stood up and it struck me that the art of standing had changed. In an instant I was down on my hands and knees, retching miserably onto the dirt in the middle of our camp. In spite of all the ridiculousness of my life in the preceding years, I’d never been sick from alcohol before. When I was done, Stacy placed my water bottle beside me, murmuring that I needed to drink. The real me inside the blur I’d become realized she was right, that I wasn’t only drunk but also profoundly dehydrated. I hadn’t had a sip of water since I was on the hot trail that afternoon. I forced myself to sit up and drink.

When I took a sip, I instantly retched again.

In the morning, I rose before the others and did what I could to sweep the vomit away with the branch of a fir tree. I went to the shower room, took off my dirty clothes, and stood under the hot spray of water in the concrete stall feeling like someone had beaten me the night before. I didn’t have time to be hungover. I planned to be back on the trail by midday. I dressed and returned to camp and sat at the table drinking as much water as I could tolerate, reading all nine of my letters one by one while the others slept. Paul was philosophical and loving about our divorce. Joe was romantic and rash, saying nothing about whether he was in rehab. Karen was brief and workaday, providing me with an update about her life. The letters from friends were a rush of love and gossip, news and funny tales. By the time I finished reading them, the others were emerging from their tents, limping into the day the way I did each morning until my joints warmed up. I was grateful that every last one of them looked at least half as hungover as me. We all smiled at one another, miserable and amused. Helen, Sam, and Sarah left to take showers, Rex and Stacy to pay one more visit to the store.

“They have cinnamon rolls,” said Rex, trying to tempt me to join them as they walked away, but I waved him off, and not only because the idea of eating made my stomach roil. Between the burger and the wine and the snacks I’d purchased the afternoon before, I was already, and yet again, down to a little less than five bucks.

When they left, I culled my resupply box, organizing my food into a pile to pack into Monster. I’d be carrying a heavy load of food on this next stretch—one of the longest sections on the PCT: it was 156 miles to Seiad Valley.

“You and Sarah need any dinners?” I asked John, who was sitting at the table, the two of us briefly alone in camp. “I’ve got extras of these.” I held up a packet of something called Fiesta Noodles, a dish I’d tolerated well enough in the early days but now loathed.

“Nah. Thanks,” he said.

I pulled out James Joyce’s Dubliners and put it to my nose, the cover green and tattered. It smelled musty and nice, exactly like the used bookstore in Minneapolis where I’d purchased it months earlier. I opened it and saw my copy had been printed decades before I was born.

“What’s this?” John asked, reaching for a postcard I’d bought in the convenience store the afternoon before. It was a photograph of a chainsaw carving of a Sasquatch, the words Bigfoot Country emblazoned across the top of the card. “Do you believe they exist?” he asked, putting the card back.

“No. But the people who do claim that this is the Bigfoot capital of the world.”

“People say a lot of things,” he replied.

“Well, if they’re anywhere, I suppose it would be here,” I said, and we looked around. Beyond the trees that surrounded us stood the ancient gray rocks called Castle Crags, their crenellated summits rising cathedral-like above us. We’d pass them soon on the trail, as we hiked through a miles-long band of granite and ultramafic rocks that my guidebook described as “igneous in origin and intrusive by nature,” whatever that meant. I’d never been much interested in geology, but I didn’t need to know the meaning of ultramafic to see that I was moving into different country. My transition into the Cascade Range had been like the one I’d experienced crossing into the Sierra Nevada: I’d been hiking for days in each before I felt I was actually entering my idea of them.

“Only one more stop,” said John, as if he could read my thoughts. “We’ve just got Seiad Valley and then it’s on to Oregon. We’re only about two hundred miles from the border.”

I nodded and smiled. I didn’t think the words only and two hundred miles belonged in the same sentence. I hadn’t let myself think much beyond the next stop.

“Oregon!” he exclaimed, and the joy in his voice almost lured me in, almost made it seem like those two hundred miles would be a snap, but I knew better. There hadn’t been a week on the trail that hadn’t been a crucible for me.

“Oregon,” I conceded, my face going serious. “But California first.”

WILD

Sometimes it seemed that the Pacific Crest Trail was one long mountain I was ascending. That at my journey’s end at the Columbia River, I’d reach the trail’s summit, rather than its lowest point. This feeling of ascension wasn’t only metaphorical. It literally felt as if I were almost always, impossibly, going up. At times I almost wept with the relentlessness of it, my muscles and lungs searing with the effort. It was only when I thought I couldn’t go up any longer that the trail would level off and descend.

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I’d go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I’d pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you’d just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

When I left Castle Crags at two—an hour behind Stacy and Rex and a few hours ahead of the couples—I was wearing boots that were a whole blissful size bigger than the last pair had been. “I’m the Bigfoot!” I’d joked as I said goodbye to the couples. I walked up and up into the searing hot day, feeling exuberant to be on the trail, the last dregs of my hangover soon sweated out of me. Up and up I went, all through that afternoon and the following day, though it wasn’t long before my enthusiasm over my new boots faded, replaced by the bleak understanding that, footwise, things weren’t going to be any different for me. My new boots had only chawed my feet afresh. I was passing through the beautiful territory I’d come to take for granted, my body finally up to the task of hiking the big miles, but because of my foot troubles, I sank into the grimmest despair. I remembered making that wish upon the star when I was with Brent in Belden Town. It appeared that I really had jinxed myself by saying it aloud. Perhaps my feet would never be okay.

Lost in a spiral of bitter thoughts on my second day out of Castle Crags, I nearly stepped on two rattlesnakes that sat coiled up on the trail within a few miles of each other. Each snake had literally rattled me back from where I was, warning me off at the last minute. Chastened, I tried to rattle myself back too. I marched on, imagining unimaginable things—that my feet were not actually attached to me, say, or that the sensation I was having wasn’t really pain but simply a sensation.

Hot, angry, sick of myself, I stopped for lunch beneath the shade of a tree, laid out my tarp and reclined on it. I’d camped with Rex and Stacy the night before and planned to meet up with them again that night—the couples were still somewhere behind us—but I’d spent the day hiking alone without seeing a soul. I watched birds of prey soaring far over the rocky peaks, the occasional white wispy cloud traveling slowly across the sky, until I fell asleep without meaning to. I woke up a half hour later with a startled gasp, creeped out by a dream—the same dream I’d had the night before. In it, Bigfoot had kidnapped me. He’d done it in a fairly mannerly fashion, approaching to pull me by the hand deep into the woods, where an entire village of other Bigfoots lived. In the dream I was both astonished and frightened at the sight of them. “How have you hid from humans so long?” I’d asked my Bigfoot captor, but he only grunted. As I looked at him, I realized that he was not a Bigfoot at all but a man wearing a mask and a hairy suit. I could see his pale human flesh beneath the edge of his mask, which terrified me.

I brushed the dream aside when I’d awakened that morning, blaming it on the postcard I’d bought in Castle Crags, but now that I’d had the dream twice, it seemed to carry more weight, as if the dream weren’t really a dream but a foreboding sign—of what, I didn’t know. I stood up, hoisted Monster back on, and scanned the lined crags, the rocky peaks and high gray and rust-colored cliffs that surrounded me near and far among the patches of green trees, feeling a cool unease. When I met up with Stacy and Rex that evening, I was more than a little relieved to see them. I’d felt jumpy for hours, tentative about the small noises that came from the bushes and unnerved by the long silences.

“How are your feet?” asked Stacy as I pitched my tent near hers. In reply, I only sat in the dirt and pulled my boots and socks off and showed them to her.

“Damn,” she whispered. “That looks painful.”

“So guess what I heard yesterday morning at the store?” asked Rex. He was stirring a pot of something over the flame of his stove, his face still pink from the day’s exertions. “Apparently there’s this thing called the Rainbow Gathering up ahead at Toad Lake.”

“Toad Lake?” I asked, suddenly remembering the woman I’d met in the restroom at the Reno bus station. She’d been going there.

“Yeah,” said Rex. “It’s only half a mile off the trail, about nine miles up ahead. I think we should go.”

I clapped my hands in glee.

“What’s the Rainbow Gathering?” asked Stacy.

I explained it to them while we ate dinner—I’d gone a couple of summers before. The Rainbow Gathering is organized by the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loose tribe of so-called freethinkers, who share a common goal of peace and love on earth. Every summer they set up an encampment on national forest land that attracts thousands in a celebration that culminates during the Fourth of July week, but simmers all summer long.

“There are drum jams and bonfires and parties,” I explained to Rex and Stacy. “But best of all there are these amazing outdoor kitchens where people go and make all these breads and cook vegetables and stews and rice. All sorts of things that anyone can just go and eat.”

“Anyone?” asked Rex in a pained voice.

“Yep,” I said. “You just bring your own cup and spoon.”

While we talked, I decided that I’d stay at the Rainbow Gathering for a few days, my hiking schedule be damned. I needed to let my feet heal and to get my head back in the game, to shake this spooky feeling that had blossomed inside me that I might be abducted by a mythical bipedal humanoid beast.

And possibly, just perhaps, I might get myself laid by a hot hippy.

Later, in my tent, I rummaged through my pack and found the condom I’d carried all this way—the one I’d rescued back in Kennedy Meadows, when Albert had purged the rest from my pack. It was still unspoiled in its little white packet. It seemed it was high time to put it to use. In the six weeks I’d been on the trail, I hadn’t even masturbated, too wrecked by the end of each day to do anything but read and too repulsed by my own sweaty stench for my mind to move in any direction but sleep.

The next day I walked faster than ever, wincing with each step, the trail undulating between 6,500 and 7,300 feet as it offered up views of high pristine lakes below the trail and endless mountains in the near and far distance. It was noon when we started down the little trail that descended from the PCT to Toad Lake.

“It doesn’t look like much so far,” said Rex as we gazed at the lake 350 feet below.

“It doesn’t look like anything,” I said. There was only the lake surrounded by a gathering of scraggly pines with Mount Shasta to the east—after having it in sight north of me since Hat Creek Rim, I was now finally moving past the showy 14,000-foot peak.

“Maybe the Gathering is back a ways from the water,” said Stacy, though once we reached the lake’s shore it was clear that there was no happy encampment, no writhing mass of people jamming and tripping and making hearty stew. There were no dark breads or sexy hippies.

The Rainbow Gathering was a bust.

The three of us lunched dejectedly near the lake, eating the miserable things we always ate. Afterwards, Rex went for a swim and Stacy and I walked without our packs down the steep trail toward a jeep road our guidebook said was there. In spite of the evidence, we hadn’t entirely given up hope that we’d find the Rainbow Gathering, but when we came to the rough dirt road after ten minutes, there was nothing. No one. It was all trees, dirt, rocks, and weeds, just like it had always been.

“I guess we got the wrong information,” said Stacy, scanning the landscape, her voice high with the same rage and regret that welled in me. My disappointment felt tremendous and infantile, like I might have the sort of tantrum I hadn’t had since I was three. I went to a large flat boulder next to the road, lay down on it, and closed my eyes to blot the stupid world out so this wouldn’t be the thing that finally brought me to tears on the trail. The rock was warm and smooth, wide as a table. It felt incredibly good against my back.

“Wait,” said Stacy after a while. “I thought I heard something.”

I opened my eyes and listened. “Probably just the wind,” I said, hearing nothing.

“Probably.” She looked at me and we smiled wanly at each other. She wore a sun hat that tied under her chin and short shorts with gaiters that went up to her knees, a getup that always made her look like a Girl Scout to me. When I’d first met her, I’d been slightly disappointed that she wasn’t more like my friends and me. She was quieter, emotionally cooler, less feminist and artsy and political, more mainstream. If we’d met off the trail I didn’t know if we’d have become friends, but by now she’d become dear to me.

“I hear it again,” she said suddenly, looking down the road.

I stood up when a small beat-up pickup truck packed full of people rounded the bend. It had Oregon plates. It drove straight up to us and screeched to a sudden stop a few feet away. Before the driver had even turned the engine off, the seven people and two dogs in the truck started leaping out. Ragtag and grubby, dressed in high hippy regalia, these people were unquestionably members of the Rainbow Tribe. Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in bandannas and beads. I reached to touch their furry backs as they darted past me and into the weeds.

“Hi,” Stacy and I said in unison to the four men and three women who stood before us, though in return they only gazed at us, squinty-eyed and aggrieved, as if they’d emerged from a cave rather than the bed or the cab of a truck. It seemed as if they’d been up all night or were coming down from hallucinogenics or both.

“Is this the Rainbow Gathering?” the man who’d been behind the wheel demanded. He was tan and small-boned. A strange grungy white headband that covered most of his head held his long wavy hair back from his face.

“That’s what we were looking for too, but we’re the only ones here,” I replied.

“Oh my fucking GOD!” moaned a pale waif of a woman with a bare, skeletal midriff and a collage of Celtic tattoos. “We drove all the way from fucking Ashland for nothing?” She went to lie across the boulder I’d recently vacated. “I’m so hungry I’m seriously going to die.”

“I’m hungry too,” whined another of the women—a black-haired dwarf who wore a string belt with little silver bells attached to it. She went and stood by the waif and petted her head.

“Fucking folkalizers!” bellowed the headband man.

“Fucking right,” mumbled a man with a green Mohawk and a big silver nose ring like the kind you see every now and then on a bull.

“You know what I’m gonna do?” asked the headband man. “I’m gonna make my own fucking Gathering up at Crater Lake. I don’t need those fucking folkalizers to tell me where to go. I got major influence around here.”

“How far is Crater Lake?” asked the last of the women in an Australian accent. She was tall, beautiful, and blonde, everything about her a spectacle—her hair in a heap of dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, her ears pierced with what looked like actual bird bones, her every last finger clad in extravagant rings.

“Not too far, toots,” said the headband man.

“Don’t call me ‘toots,’ ” she replied.

“Is ‘toots’ offensive in Australia?” he asked.

She sighed, then made a growling sound.

“All right, baby, I won’t call you ‘toots,’ then.” He cackled to the sky. “But I will call you ‘baby’ if I damn well please. Like Jimi Hendrix said: ‘I call everybody baby.’ ”

My eyes met Stacy’s.

“We were trying to find the Gathering too,” I said. “We heard it was here.”

“We’re hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” added Stacy.

“I. Need. Food!” wailed the waif on the rock.

“I’ve got some you’re welcome to,” I said to her. “But it’s up at the lake.”

She only looked at me, her face expressionless, her eyes glazed. I wondered how old she was. She seemed to be my age, and yet she could’ve passed for twelve.

“Do you have room in your car?” asked the Australian confidentially. “If you two are headed back to Ashland, I’d catch a ride with you.”

“We’re on foot,” I said to her blank stare. “We have backpacks. We left them up at the lake.”

“Actually, we are going to Ashland,” said Stacy. “But it’ll take us about twelve days to get there.” The two of us laughed, though no one else did.

They all piled back into the truck and drove away a few minutes later, and Stacy and I walked the trail back to Toad Lake. The two couples were sitting with Rex when we returned and we all hiked back up to the PCT together, though it wasn’t long before I was bringing up the rear, the last to limp into camp that night near dark, hindered by the catastrophe of my feet.

“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” said Sarah. “We thought you’d already stopped to camp.”

“Well, I’m here,” I replied, feeling stung, though I knew she meant only to console me about my foot troubles. In the midst of our drinking and storytelling back in Castle Crags, Sam had joked that my trail name should be the Hapless Hiker after I’d told them about my various misadventures. I’d laughed at the time—the Hapless Hiker seemed a fairly apt name—but I didn’t want to be that hiker. I wanted to be the hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

In the morning, I rose before the others, quietly mixing my Better Than Milk into my pot with cold water and mildly stale granola and raisins. I’d woken from another Bigfoot dream, almost exactly the same as the two previous ones. As I ate my breakfast, I found myself listening carefully for sounds in the still-dark trees. I hiked away before the others even emerged from their tents, happy to get a head start. Exhausted, slow, and footsore as I was, hapless as I might be, I was keeping up with the others—the people I thought of as real hikers. Seventeen and nineteen miles a day, day after day, had become de rigueur.

An hour out, I heard an enormous crashing in the bushes and trees beside me. I froze, unsure of whether to yell or remain perfectly quiet. I couldn’t help it: silly as it was, that man with the Bigfoot mask in my dreams flashed through my mind.

“Ah!” I yelled when a hairy beast materialized in front of me on the trail, so close I could smell him. A bear, I realized a moment later. His eyes passed blandly over me before he snorted and reeled and ran northward up the trail.

Why did they always have to run in the direction I was going?

I waited a few minutes and then hiked on, picking my way trepidatiously along, belting out lines from songs. “Oh I could drink a case of youuuuu, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” I crooned loudly.

“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean …!” I growled.

“Time out for tiny little tea leaves in Tetley Tea!” I chirped.

It worked. I didn’t run into the bear again. Or Bigfoot.

Instead, I came upon something I actually had to fear: a wide sheaf of icy snow covering the trail at a 40-degree angle. Hot as it was, not all the snow had melted off the north-facing slopes. I could see to the other side of the snow. I could practically throw a stone across it. But I couldn’t do the same with myself. I had to walk it. I looked down the mountain, my eyes following the course of the snow, should I slip and slide. It ended far below at a gathering of jagged boulders. Beyond them there was only air.

I began to chip my way across, kicking each step with my boots, bracing myself with my ski pole. Instead of feeling more confident on the snow, given the experience I’d had with it in the Sierra, I felt more shaken, more aware of what could go wrong. One foot slipped out from beneath me and I fell onto my hands; slowly I stood again with my knees bent. I’m going to fall was the thought that came into my head, and with it I froze and looked down at the boulders below me, imagining myself careening into them. I looked at the place I’d come from and the place I was going, the two equidistant from me. I was too far from either, so I forced my way forward. I went down on my hands and crawled the rest of the way across, my legs shaking uncontrollably, my ski pole clanging along beside me, dangling from my wrist by its pink nylon strap.

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