Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“Hi,” I said, pausing before him, feeling buoyed to see a familiar face, even if it was his. He still wore his strange grubby headband.

“Howdy,” he replied, obviously not remembering me. He didn’t ask me for money. Apparently, I exuded the fact that I had none. “You traveling around?” he asked.

“I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said to jog his memory.

He nodded without recognition. “A lot of people from out of town are showing up for the Dead festivities.”

“Are there festivities?” I asked.

“Tonight there’s something.”

I wondered if he’d convened a mini — Rainbow Gathering at Crater Lake, like he’d said he’d do, but not enough to ask him. “Take it easy,” I said, walking away.

I went into the co-op, the air-conditioned air so strange on my bare limbs. I’d been in convenience stores and small tourist-oriented general stores in a few of my resupply stops along the PCT, but I hadn’t been in a store like this since I’d begun my trip. I walked up and down the aisles looking at things I couldn’t have, stupefied by their offhand plenitude. How was it that I had ever taken these things for granted? Jars of pickles and baguettes so fresh they were packed in paper bags, bottles of orange juice and cartons of sorbet, and, most of all, the produce, which sat so brightly in bins I felt almost blinded by it. I lingered, smelling things — tomatoes and heads of butter lettuce, nectarines and limes. It was all I could do not to slip something into my pocket.

I went to the health and beauty section and pumped free samples of lotion into my palms, rubbing several kinds all over my body, their discrete fragrances making me swoon — peach and coconut, lavender and tangerine. I pondered the sample tubes of lipstick and applied one called Plum Haze with one of the natural, organic, made-from-recycled-material Q-tip knockoffs that sat nearby in a medicinal-looking glass jar with a silver lid. I blotted with a natural, organic, made-from-recycled-material tissue and gazed at myself in a round mirror that stood on a pedestal near the lipstick display. I’d chosen Plum Haze because its shade was similar to the lipstick I wore in my regular, pre-PCT life, but now, with it on, I seemed to look like a clown, my mouth showy and manic against my weathered face.

“Can I help you?” a woman with granny glasses and a nametag that said JEN G. asked me.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking.”

“That shade is nice on you. It totally brings out the blue of your eyes.”

“Do you think so?” I asked, feeling suddenly shy. I looked at myself in the little round mirror, as if I were genuinely contemplating whether to purchase Plum Haze.

“I like your necklace too,” Jen G. said. “Starved. That’s funny.”

I put my hand to it. “It says Strayed , actually. That’s my last name.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jen G. said, stepping closer to see it. “I just looked at it wrong. It’s funny both ways.”

“It’s an optical illusion,” I said.

I walked down the aisles to the deli, where I pulled a coarse napkin from a dispenser and wiped the Plum Haze off my lips, and then perused the lemonade selection. They didn’t carry Snapple, much to my chagrin. I bought a natural, organic, fresh-squeezed, no-preservatives lemonade with the last money I had and returned with it to sit in front of the store. In my excitement to reach town, I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I got a protein bar and some stale nuts from my pack and ate them while forbidding myself to think about the meal I’d planned to have instead: a Caesar salad with a grilled chicken breast and a basket of crusty French bread that I’d dunk into olive oil and a Diet Coke to drink, with a banana split for dessert. I drank my lemonade and chatted with whoever approached: I spoke to a man from Michigan who’d moved to Ashland to attend the local college, and another who played the drums in a band; one woman who was a potter who specialized in goddess figures, and another who asked me in a European accent if I was going to the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration that night.

She handed me a flyer that said Remembering Jerry across the top.

“It’s at a club near the hostel, if that’s where you’re staying,” she told me. She was plump and pretty, her flaxen hair tied into a loose bun at the back of her head. “We’re traveling around too,” she added, gesturing to my pack. I didn’t understand who the “we” referred to until a man appeared by her side. He was her physical opposite — tall and almost painfully thin, dressed in a maroon wrap skirt that hung barely past his bony knees, his shortish hair bound into four or five pigtails scattered around his head.

“Did you hitchhike here?” asked the man. He was American.

I explained to them about hiking the PCT, about how I planned to lay over in Ashland for the weekend. The man was indifferent, but the woman was astounded.

“My name is Susanna and I am from Switzerland,” she said, taking my hand in hers. “We call what you’re doing the pilgrim way . If you’d like, I would rub your feet.”

“Oh, that’s sweet, but you don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I want to. It would be my honor. It is the Swiss way. I will return.” She turned and walked into the co-op, as I called after her telling her she was too kind. When she was gone, I looked at her boyfriend. He reminded me of a Kewpie doll, with his hair like that.

“She really likes to do this, so no worries,” he said, sitting down beside me.

When Susanna emerged a minute later, she held her hands cupped before her, a puddle of fragrant oil in her palms. “It’s peppermint,” she said, smiling at me. “Take off your boots and socks!”

“But my feet,” I hesitated. “They’re in pretty rough shape and dirty—”

“This is my calling!” she yelled, so I obeyed; soon she was slathering me with peppermint oil. “Your feet, they are very strong,” said Susanna. “Like those of an animal. I can feel their strength in my palms. And also how they are battered. I see you miss the toenails.”

“Yes,” I murmured, reclining on my elbows in the grass, my eyes fluttering shut.

“The spirits told me to do this,” she said as she pressed her thumbs into the soles of my feet.

“The spirits told you?”

“Yes. When I saw you, the spirits whispered that I had something to give you, so that is why I approached with the flyer, but then I understood there was something else. In Switzerland, we have great respect for people who travel the pilgrim way.” Rolling my toes one by one between her fingers, she looked up at me and asked, “What does this mean on your necklace — that you are starved?”

And so it went, for the next couple of hours, as I hung out in front of the co-op. I was starved. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt only like a bucket of desire, a hungry, wilted thing. One person gave me a vegan muffin, another a quinoa salad that had grapes in it. Several approached to admire my horse tattoo or inquire about my backpack. Around four, Stacy came along and I told her my predicament; she offered to loan me money until my box arrived.

“Let me try at the post office again,” I said, loath to take her up on her offer, grateful as I was for it. I returned to the post office and stood in line, disappointed to see that the same woman who’d told me my box wasn’t there was still working the counter. When I approached her, I asked for my box as if I hadn’t been there only a few hours before. She went into a back room and returned holding it, pushing it across the counter to me without apology.

“So it was here all along,” I said, but she didn’t care, replying that she simply must not have seen it before.