Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“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.

When I reached the trail on the other side, I felt stupid and weak and sorry for myself, vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt on the trail before, envious of the couples who had each other, and of Rex and Stacy who had so easily become a hiking pair — when Rex left the trail in Seiad Valley, Stacy would be meeting her friend Dee so they could hike through Oregon together, but I’d forever be alone. And why? What did being alone do? I’m not afraid , I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind. But it didn’t feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn’t entirely true anymore.

Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.