Cheryl Strayed - Wild

I was too ecstatic to be angry as I walked with Stacy to the hostel, holding my box. I checked in and followed Stacy up the stairs and through the main women’s dorm room to a small, private alcove that sat under the eaves of the building. Inside, there were three single beds. Stacy had one, her friend Dee had another, and they’d saved the third for me. Stacy introduced me to Dee and we talked while I opened my box. There were my clean old jeans, my new bra and underwear, and more money than I’d had since I started my trip.

I went to the shower room and stood under the hot water scrubbing myself. I hadn’t showered for two weeks, during which the temperatures had ranged from the thirties to the low hundreds. I could feel the water washing the layers of sweat away, as if they were an actual layer of skin. When I was done, I gazed at myself naked in the mirror, my body leaner than the last time I’d looked, my hair lighter than it had been since I was a little girl. I put on the new black bra, underwear, and T-shirt and my faded Levi’s, which were loose on me now, though I hadn’t quite been able to fit into them three months before, and returned to the alcove and put on my boots. They were no longer new — dirty and hot, heavy and painful — but they were the only shoes I had.

At dinner with Stacy and Dee, I ordered everything I desired. Afterwards, I went to a shoe store and bought a black and blue pair of Merrell sports sandals, the kind I should’ve sprung for before my trip. We returned to the hostel, but within minutes Stacy and I were out again, headed for the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration at a nearby club, leaving Dee behind to sleep. We sat at a table in a little roped-off area that bordered the dance floor, drinking white wine and watching women of all ages, shapes, and sizes and an occasional man spinning to the Grateful Dead songs that played one after another. Behind the dancers, there was a screen upon which a series of images were projected, some abstract, psychedelic swirls, others literal, drawn renditions of Jerry and his band.

“We love you, Jerry!” a woman at the next table belted out when an image of him appeared.

“Are you going to dance?” I asked Stacy.

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back to the hostel. We’re heading out early in the morning.”

“I think I’m going to stay for a bit,” I said. “Wake me up to say goodbye if I’m still sleeping tomorrow.” After she left, I ordered another glass of wine and sat listening to the music, watching people, feeling a profound happiness to simply be in a room among others on a summer evening with music playing. When I rose to leave half an hour later, the song “Box of Rain” came on. It was one of my favorite Dead songs and I was a bit buzzed, so I impulsively shot out to the dance floor and began to dance, and then regretted it almost as quickly. My knees felt stiff and creaky from all the hiking, my hips strangely inflexible, but just as I was about to leave, the man from Michigan, whom I’d met earlier in the day, was suddenly upon me, seemingly dancing with me, spinning in and out of my orbit like a hippy gyroscope, drawing an imaginary box in the air with his fingers while nodding at me, as if I knew what the hell that meant, and so it seemed rude to leave.

“I always think of Oregon when I hear this song,” he shouted over the music as I moved my body in a faux boogie. “Get it?” he asked. “Box of rain? Like Oregon is a box of rain too?”

I nodded and laughed, attempting to seem as if I were having a fun time, but the moment the song ended, I bolted away to stand near a low wall that ran alongside the bar.

“Hey,” a man said to me after a while, and I turned. He stood on the other side of the waist-high wall holding a marker and a flashlight — an employee of the club, apparently manning the territory in which you could drink — though I hadn’t noticed him there before.

“Hey,” I said back. He was handsome and looked a bit older than me, his dark curls skimming the tops of his shoulders. WILCO it said across the front of his T-shirt. “I love that band,” I said, gesturing to his shirt.

“You know them?” he asked.

“Of course I know them,” I said.

His brown eyes crinkled into a smile. “Rad,” he said, “I’m Jonathan,” and he shook my hand. The music started up before I could tell him my name, but he leaned into my ear to ask in a delicate shout where I was from. He seemed to know I wasn’t from Ashland. I shouted back at him, explaining as concisely as I could about the PCT, and then he leaned toward my ear again and yelled a long sentence that I couldn’t make out over the music, but I didn’t mind because of the wonderful way his lips brushed against my hair and his breath tickled my neck so I could feel it all the way down my body.

“What?” I yelled back at him when he was done, and so he did it again, talking slower and louder this time, and I understood that he was telling me that he worked late tonight, but that tomorrow night he’d be off at eleven and would I like to come see the band that was performing and then go out with him afterwards?

“Sure!” I shouted, though I half wanted to make him repeat what he’d said so his mouth would do that thing to my hair and my neck again. He handed the marker to me and mimed that I should write my name on his palm so he’d be able to put me on the guest list. Cheryl Strayed , I wrote as neatly as I could, my hands shaking. When I was done, he looked at it and gave me a thumbs-up, and I waved and walked out the door feeling ecstatic.

I had a date.

Did I have a date? I walked the warm streets second-guessing myself. Maybe my name wouldn’t be on the list, after all. Maybe I’d misheard him. Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less, but this was different. I was different. Wasn’t I?

I went back to the hostel and walked quietly past the beds where women unknown to me lay sleeping and into the little alcove under the eaves, where Dee and Stacy slept too, and I took off my clothes and got into the real actual bed that was astoundingly mine for the night. I lay awake for an hour, running my hands over my body, imagining what it would feel like to Jonathan if he touched it the next night: the mounds of my breasts and the plain of my abdomen, the muscles of my legs and the coarse hair on my pudenda — all of that seemed passably okay — but when I got to the palm-sized patches on my hips that felt like a cross between tree bark and a plucked dead chicken, I realized that under no circumstances while on my date tomorrow could I take off my pants. It was probably just as well. God knows I’d taken off my pants too many times to count, certainly more than was good for me.

I spent the next day talking myself out of seeing Jonathan that night. All the time that I was doing my laundry, feasting at restaurants, and wandering the streets watching people, I asked myself, Who is this good-looking Wilco fan to me anyway ? And yet all the while, my mind kept imagining the things we might do.

With my pants still on.

That evening I showered, dressed, and walked to the co-op to put on some Plum Haze lipstick and ylang-ylang oil from the free samples before strolling up to the woman who staffed the door at the club where Jonathan worked. “I might be on the list,” I said casually, and gave her my name, ready to be rebuffed.

Without a word, she stamped my hand with red ink.

Jonathan and I spotted each other the moment I entered; he waved at me from his unreachable place on a raised platform, working the lights. I got a glass of wine and stood sipping it in what I hoped was an elegant way, listening to the band near the low wall where I’d met Jonathan the night before. They were a fairly famous bluegrass band from the Bay Area. They dedicated a song to Jerry Garcia. The music was good, but I couldn’t focus on it because I was trying so hard to seem content and perfectly at ease, as if I would be at this very club listening to this very band whether Jonathan had invited me to or not, and, most of all, to be neither looking nor not looking at Jonathan, who was looking at me every time I looked at him, which then made me worry that he thought I was always looking at him because what if it was only a coincidence that every time I looked at him he was looking at me and he wasn’t actually looking at me always, but only in the moments that I looked at him, which would compel him to wonder, Why is this woman always looking at me? So then I didn’t look at him for three whole long bluegrass songs, one of which featured an improvisational, seemingly endless fiddle solo until the audience clapped in appreciation and I couldn’t take it anymore and I looked and not only was he looking at me, but he also waved again.