Cheryl Strayed - Wild

I began walking down one, reasoning that I’d eventually find civilization in the form of a highway that paralleled the trail approximately twenty miles to the east. I walked not knowing exactly what road I was on, going only on faith that I would find something, walking and walking in the bright hot sun. I could smell myself as I moved. I’d packed deodorant and each morning I’d swabbed it under my arms, but it made no difference anymore. I hadn’t bathed in over a week. My body was covered with dirt and blood, my hair, dense with dust and dried sweat, plastered to my head underneath my hat. I could feel the muscles in my body growing stronger by the day and at the same time, in equal measure, my tendons and joints breaking down. My feet hurt both inside and out, their flesh rubbed raw with blisters, their bones and muscles fatigued from the miles. The road was blissfully level or gently descending, a welcome break from the relentless up and down of the trail, but still I suffered. For long stretches I tried to imagine that I didn’t actually have feet, that instead my legs ended in two impervious stumps that could endure anything.

After four hours I began to regret my decision. I might starve to death out there or be killed by marauding longhorn bulls, but on the PCT at least I knew where I was. I reread my guidebook, uncertain by now that I was even on one of the roads they’d described in a cursory way. I took out my map and compass every hour to assess and reassess my position. I pulled out Staying Found to read again how exactly to use a map and compass. I studied the sun. I passed a small herd of cows that were unbound by a fence and my heart leapt at the sight of them, though none moved in my direction. They only stopped eating to lift their heads and watch me pass while I delicately chanted to them, “Cow, cow, cow.”

The land through which the road passed was surprisingly green in places, dry and rocky in others, and twice I passed tractors parked silent and eerie by the side of the road. I walked in a state of wonder at the beauty and the silence, but by late afternoon, apprehension rose in my throat.

I was on a road, but I had not seen a human being in eight days. This was civilization and yet, aside from the free-range cows and the two abandoned tractors, and the road itself, there was no sign of it. I felt as if I were starring in a science fiction movie, as if I were the only person left on the planet, and for the first time in my journey, I felt like I might cry. I took a deep breath to push away my tears and took off my pack and set it in the dirt to regroup. There was a bend in the road ahead and I walked around it without my pack to see what I could.

What I saw were three men sitting in the cab of a yellow pickup truck.

One was white. One was black. One was Latino.

It took perhaps sixty seconds for me to reach them on foot. They watched me with the same expression on their faces as I’d had when I saw the longhorn bull the day before. As if any moment they might yell “Moose!” My relief at the sight of them was enormous. Yet as I strode toward them my whole body tingled with the complicated knowledge that I was no longer the sole star in a film about a planet devoid of people. Now I was in a different kind of movie entirely: I was the sole woman with three men of unknown intent, character, and origin watching me from the shade of a yellow truck.

When I explained my situation to them through the open driver’s-side window, they gazed at me silently, their eyes shifting from startled to stunned to scoffing until they all burst out laughing.

“Do you know what you walked into, honey?” the white man asked me when he’d recovered, and I shook my head. He and the black man looked to be in their sixties, the Latino barely out of his teens.

“You see this here mountain?” he asked. He pointed straight ahead through the windshield from his position behind the wheel. “We’re getting ready to blow that mountain up.” He explained to me that a mining operation had bought rights to this patch of land and they were mining for decorative rock that people use in their yards. “My name’s Frank,” he said, tapping the brim of his cowboy hat. “And technically you’re trespassing, young lady, but we won’t hold that against you.” He looked at me and winked. “We’re just miners. We don’t own the land or else we’d have to shoot you.”

He laughed again and then gestured to the Latino in the middle and told me his name was Carlos.

“I’m Walter,” said the black man sitting by the passenger window.

They were the first people I’d seen since the two guys in the minivan with the Colorado plates who’d dropped me by the side of the road more than a week before. When I spoke, my voice sounded funny to me, seemed to be higher and faster than I’d remembered, as if it were something I couldn’t quite catch and hold on to, as if every word were a small bird fluttering away. They told me to get in the back of the truck, and we drove the short distance around the bend to retrieve my pack. Frank stopped and they all got out. Walter picked up my pack and was shocked by the weight.

“I was in Korea,” he said, hoisting it onto the truck’s metal bed with considerable effort. “And we ain’t never carried a pack that heavy. Or maybe once I carried one that heavy, but that was when I was being punished.”

Quickly, without my being much involved, it was decided I’d go home with Frank, where his wife would feed me dinner and I could bathe and sleep in a bed. In the morning, he’d help me get someplace where I could have my stove repaired.

“Now explain all this to me again?” Frank asked a few times, and each time all three of them listened with confused and rapt attention. They lived perhaps twenty miles from the Pacific Crest Trail and yet none of them had ever heard of it. None could fathom what business a woman had hiking it by herself, and Frank and Walter told me so, in jovial, gentlemanly terms.

“I think it’s kind of cool,” said Carlos after a while. He was eighteen, he told me, about to join the military.

“Maybe you should do this instead,” I suggested.

“Nah,” he said.

The men got into the truck again and I rode in the back for a couple of miles by myself, until we reached the spot where Walter had parked his truck. He and Carlos drove off in it and left me alone with Frank, who had another hour of work to do.

I sat in the cab of the yellow truck watching Frank go back and forth on a tractor, grading the road. Each time he passed, he waved to me, and as he rode away I surreptitiously explored the contents of his truck. In the glove compartment there was a silver flask of whiskey. I took a shallow swig, and quickly put it back, my lips on fire. I reached under the seat and pulled out a slim black case and opened it up and saw a gun as silver as the whiskey flask and shut it again and shoved it beneath the seat. The keys to the truck dangled from the ignition, and I thought idly about what would happen if I started it up and drove away. I took off my boots and massaged my feet. The little bruise on my ankle that I’d gotten from shooting heroin in Portland was still there, but faded to a faint morose yellow now. I ran my finger over it, over the bump of the tiny track mark still detectable at its core, amazed at my own ludicrousness, and then put my socks back on so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

“What kind of woman are you?” Frank asked when he was done with his work and he’d climbed into the truck beside me.

“What kind?” I asked. Our eyes locked and something in his unveiled itself, and I looked away.

“Are you like Jane? Like the kind of woman Tarzan would like?”

“I guess so,” I said, and laughed, though I felt a creeping anxiety, wishing that Frank would start the truck and drive. He was a big man, rangy and chiseled and tan. A miner who looked to me like a cowboy. His hands reminded me of all the hands of the men I’d known growing up, men who worked their bodies for a living, men whose hands would never get clean no matter how hard they scrubbed. As I sat there with him, I felt the way I always do when alone in certain circumstances with certain men — that anything could happen. That he could go about his business, mannerly and kind, or he could grab me and change the course of things entirely in an instant. With Frank in his truck, I watched his hands, his every move, each cell in my body on high alert, though I appeared as relaxed as if I’d just woken from a nap.