Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“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.