Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at her.

“Where you from?”

“Minnesota,” I called as I made my way along a bank of glass-fronted doors with cold drinks lined up in neat rows inside. I passed cans of icy beer and soda pop, bottles of mineral water and juice. I stopped at the door where the racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of lemonade — there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or pornography. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.

“If you’re done hiking for the day, you’re welcome to camp out in the field behind the store,” the woman said to me. “We let all the PCT hikers stay there.”

“Thanks, I think I’ll do that,” I said, still staring at the drinks. Perhaps I could just hold one, I thought. Just press it against my forehead for a moment. I opened the door and pulled out a bottle of pink lemonade. It was so cold it felt like it was burning my hand. “How much is this?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

“I saw you counting your pennies outside,” the woman laughed. “How much you got?”

I gave her everything I had while thanking her profusely and took the Snapple out onto the porch. Each sip sent a stab of heady pleasure through me. I held the bottle with both hands, wanting to absorb every bit of cool I could. Cars pulled up and people got out and went into the store, then came out and drove away. I watched them for an hour in a post-Snapple bliss that felt more like a drugged-up haze. After a while, a pickup slowed in front of the store just long enough for a man to climb out of the back and pull out his backpack behind him before waving the driver away. He turned to me and spotted my pack.

“Hey!” he said, a giant smile spreading across his pink beefy face. “It’s one hell of a hot day to hike on the PCT, don’t you think?”

His name was Rex. He was a big red-haired guy, gregarious and gay and thirty-eight years old. He struck me as the kind of person who gave a lot of bear hugs. He went into the store and bought three cans of beer and drank them as he sat beside me on the porch, where together we talked into the evening. He lived in Phoenix and held a corporate job he couldn’t properly make me understand, but he’d grown up in a little town in southern Oregon. He’d hiked from the Mexican border to Mojave in the spring — getting off the trail at the very place where I’d gotten on and at about the same time as well — to return to Phoenix for six weeks to tend to some business matters before starting back on the trail at Old Station, having elegantly bypassed all the snow.

“I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments.

“But I can’t get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer too ashamed to admit it.

“Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex.

“REI.”

“Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for free.”

“They will?”

“Call the 1-800 number,” he said.

I thought about it all through the evening as Rex and I camped together in the field behind the store, and all the next day as I raced faster than ever through twelve mercifully unchallenging miles to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park. When I arrived, I immediately collected my resupply box from the concessionaire’s store and went to the pay phone nearby to call the operator and then REI. Within five minutes, the woman I spoke to had agreed to mail me a new pair of boots, one size larger, via overnight mail, no charge.

“Are you sure ?” I kept asking her, yammering on about the trouble my too-small boots had caused me.

“Yes,” she said placidly, and now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade. I gave her the address of the park store, reading it from my as-yet-unopened box. I’d have jumped with joy after I hung up the phone if my feet had been well enough to do it. I ripped open my box and found my twenty dollars and joined the crowd of tourists in the line, hoping none of them would notice that I reeked. I bought an ice-cream cone and sat at a picnic table eating it with barely restrained glee. Rex walked up as I sat there, and a few minutes after that Trina appeared with her big white dog. We embraced and I introduced her to Rex. She and Stacy had arrived the day before. She’d decided to get off the trail here and return to Colorado to do several day hikes near her home for the rest of the summer instead of hiking the PCT. Stacy would be continuing on as planned.

“I’m sure she’d be happy if you joined her,” Trina added. “She’ll be hiking out in the morning.”

“I can’t,” I said, and giddily explained that I needed to wait for my new boots.

“We worried about you on Hat Creek Rim,” she said. “No water at—”

“I know,” I said, and we ruefully shook our heads.

“Come,” she said to Rex and me. “I’ll show you where we’re camped. It’s a twenty-minute walk, but it’s away from all this,” she gestured with an air of disdain toward the tourists, the snack bar, and the store. “Plus, it’s free.”

My feet had gotten to the point that each time I rested it hurt more the next time I got up to walk, their various sores reopening with every new effort. I limped behind Trina and Rex down a path through the woods that took us back to the PCT, where there was a small clearing among the trees.

“Cheryl!” Stacy called, coming to hug me.

We talked about Hat Creek Rim and the heat, the trail and the lack of water, and what the snack bar had to offer for dinner. I took off my boots and socks and put on my camp sandals and set up my tent and went through the pleasant ritual of unpacking my box while we chatted. Stacy and Rex made fast friends and decided to hike the next section of the trail together. By the time I was ready to walk back up to the snack bar for dinner, my big toes had swollen and reddened so much that they looked like two beets. I couldn’t even bear to wear socks anymore, so I hobbled up to the snack bar in my sandals instead, where we sat around a picnic table with paper boats of hot dogs and jalapeño poppers and nachos with fluorescent orange cheese dripping off the sides. It felt like a feast and a celebration. We held up our wax cups of soda pop and made a toast.

“To Trina and Odin’s trip home!” we said, and clinked our cups.

“To Stacy and Rex hitting the trail!” we cheered.

“To Cheryl’s new boots!” we yelled.

And I drank with solemnity to that.

When I woke the next morning, my tent was the only one in the clearing among the trees. I walked up to the bathhouse meant for the campers in the official park campground, took a shower, and returned to my campsite, where I sat in my camp chair for hours. I ate breakfast and read half of A Summer Bird-Cage in one sitting. In the afternoon, I walked to the store near the snack bar to see if my boots were there, but the woman who worked at the counter told me the mail hadn’t arrived yet.

I left forlornly, strolling in my sandals down a short paved path to an overlook to see the grand falls that the park is named for. Burney Falls is the most voluminous waterfall in the state of California for most of the year, a sign explained. As I gazed at the thundering water, I felt almost invisible among the people with their cameras, fanny packs, and Bermuda shorts. I sat on a bench and watched a couple feed an entire pack of Breathsavers to a gaggle of overly familiar squirrels who darted around a sign that said DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE. It enraged me to see them do that, but my fury was not only about how they were perpetuating the habituation of the squirrels, I realized. It was also that they were a couple. To witness the way they leaned into each other and laced their fingers together and tugged each other tenderly down the paved path was almost unbearable. I was simultaneously sickened by it and envious of what they had. Their existence seemed proof that I would never succeed at romantic love. I’d felt so strong and content while talking on the phone with Paul in Old Station only a few days before, but I didn’t feel anything like that anymore. Everything that had rested then was roiling now.