Cheryl Strayed - Wild

He was a mannerly bird. He shat on a square of newspaper in a cat-litter pan in the corner. Whether he’d been trained to do it by my mother or did it of his own volition, I don’t know. A few minutes after we all sat down on the floor around the table, Canary landed on Eddie’s head. Usually when he landed on us, he’d perch there for only a moment and then fly away, but on top of Eddie’s head, Canary stayed. We giggled. He turned to us and asked, with false obliviousness, what we were laughing at.

“There’s a canary on your head,” we told him.

“What?” he said, looking around the room in pretend surprise.

“There’s a canary on your head,” we yelled.

“Where?” he asked.

“There’s a canary on your head!” we yelled, now in delighted hysterics.

There was a canary on his head and, miraculously, the canary stayed there, all through dinner, all through afterwards, falling asleep, nestling in.

So did Eddie.

At least he did until my mother died. Her illness had initially brought the two of us closer than we’d ever been. We’d become comrades in the weeks that she was sick — playing tag team at the hospital, consulting each other about medical decisions, weeping together when we knew the end was near, meeting with the funeral home director together after she died. But soon after that, Eddie pulled away from my siblings and me. He acted like he was our friend instead of our father. Quickly, he fell in love with another woman and soon she moved into our house with her children. By the time the first anniversary of my mother’s death rolled around, Karen, Leif, and I were essentially on our own; most of my mother’s things were in boxes I’d packed up and stored. He loved us, Eddie said, but life moved on. He was still our father, he claimed, but he did nothing to demonstrate that. I railed against it, but eventually had no choice but to accept what my family had become: not a family at all.

You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, my mother had often said.

By the time the young women pulled their van over to the side of the narrow highway, the tall trees that lined the road almost entirely blotted out the setting sun. I thanked them for the ride and looked around as they drove away. I was standing next to a forest service sign that said WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND. The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their van. I hadn’t bothered to look at my map as we drove. After days of constant vigilance, I was tired of checking the guidebook and checking again. I’d simply enjoyed the ride, lulled by the women’s confidence that they knew where they were going. From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that would take me up to the PCT. I read the fresh pages that I’d ripped from my guidebook as I walked the paved loops of the campground, straining to see the words in the dying light. My heart leapt with relief when I came across the words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was nearly two miles away from the PCT. The words “just beyond it” had meant something different to the women in the van than they did to me.

I looked around at the water spigots, the sets of brown outhouses, and the big sign that explained how one should go about paying for a spot for the night by leaving money in an envelope that should then be deposited through a slot in a wooden box. Aside from a few RVs and a smattering of tents, the campground was eerily empty. I walked another paved loop, wondering what to do. I didn’t have money to pay to camp, but it was too dark to walk into the woods. I came to a campsite on the very edge of the campground, the one that was farthest away from the sign detailing how to pay. Who would even see me?

I set up my tent and cooked and ate my dinner in luxury on the picnic table with only my headlamp to light my way and peed in perfect comfort in the pit toilet, and then got into my tent and opened up The Novel . I’d read perhaps three pages when my tent was flooded with light. I unzipped my door and stepped out to greet the elderly couple who stood in the blinding headlights of a pickup truck.

“Hi,” I said tentatively.

“You need to pay for this spot,” the woman barked in response.

“I need to pay?” I said, with false innocence and surprise. “I thought only people who had cars had to pay the fee. I’m on foot. I just have my backpack.” The couple listened in silence, their wrinkled faces indignant. “I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning. By six at the latest.”

“If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay,” the woman repeated.

“It’s twelve dollars for the night,” the man added in a gasping voice.

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t happen to have any cash on me. I’m on this big trip. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail — the PCT? — and there’s all this snow up in the mountains — it’s a record year — and anyway, I got off the trail and I didn’t plan to be here because these women who gave me a ride accidentally dropped me off in the wrong place and it was—”

“None of that changes the fact you have to pay, young lady,” the man bellowed with surprising power, his voice silencing me like a great horn from the fog.

“If you can’t pay, you’ve got to pack up and leave,” said the woman. She wore a sweatshirt that had a pair of baby raccoons peeping coyly from a burrow in a tree on her chest.

“There’s no one even here! It’s the middle of the night! What harm would it do if I simply—”

“Them are the rules,” heaved the man. He turned away and got back into the truck, done with me.

“We’re sorry, miss, but we’re the camp hosts and keeping everyone to the rules is what we’re here to do,” said the woman. Her face softened for a moment in apology before she pursed her lips and added, “We’d hate to have to call the police.”

I lowered my eyes and addressed her raccoons. “I just — I can’t believe that I’m doing any harm. I mean, no one would even be using this site if I weren’t here,” I said quietly, trying to make one last appeal, woman to woman.

“We’re not saying you have to leave ,” she shouted, as if she were scolding a dog to hush up. “We’re saying you’ve got to pay .”

“Well, I can’t .”

“There’s a trail to the PCT that starts up just past the bathrooms,” the woman said, gesturing behind her. “Or you can walk on the side of the road, about a mile or so up. I think the road’s more direct than the trail. We’ll keep the lights on while you pack,” she said, and got back into the truck beside her husband, their faces now invisible to me behind the headlights.

I turned to my tent, stunned. I’d yet to meet a stranger on my trip who’d been anything but kind. I scrambled inside, put on my headlamp with shaking hands, and shoved everything I’d unpacked back into my pack without the usual orderly care for what went where. I didn’t know what I should do. It was full dark by now, the half moon in the sky. The only thing scarier than the thought of hiking along an unknown trail in the dark was walking along an unknown road in the dark. I put on Monster and waved to the couple in the truck, unable to see whether they waved back.

I walked with my headlamp in my hand. It barely lit the way for each step; the batteries were dying. I followed the pavement to the bathrooms and saw the trail the woman had mentioned leading off behind it. I took a few tentative steps onto it. I’d become used to feeling safe in the woods, safe even through all the nights, but walking in the woods in the dark felt like a different matter altogether because I couldn’t see. I could run into nocturnal animals or trip over a root. I could miss a turn and continue on where I didn’t plan to go. I walked slowly, nervously, as I had the very first day of my hike, when I’d been braced for a rattlesnake to lunge at me any second.